Apple Newton MessagePad

~ the obituary ~

the newton's peak years overlap with the years i did not have a computer at all. it launched in august 1993, when i was nine, and it was discontinued in february 1998, the same year my house got dial-up. by the time i was online, the newton was already a punchline that the english-language tech press was retelling about the simpsons, not a product anybody i knew owned.

what the newton actually was: a small black tablet with a stylus, running an operating system written from scratch by a team inside apple. you wrote on the screen with the pen and the device was supposed to convert your handwriting into text. it kept a calendar and a contacts list. you could send a fax from it over a modem dock or beam an address to another newton over infrared, and the device would sync to a mac through a serial cable. the calendar was the part reviewers admitted actually worked.

the price at launch was $699 in the us. that was iphone money in 1993. for an apple device shipped with a feature that misread your handwriting, that was the gap between idea and product the simpsons wrote a sketch about within a year.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the newton project started inside apple in 1987, under the name newton, and it had executive support from john sculley. sculley coined the term "personal digital assistant" while introducing the device at ces in january 1992. the first messagepad shipped on august 2, 1993. by the time it was on shelves, the handwriting recognition was running on a calligrapher engine that needed training and shipped untrained.

the famous simpsons gag aired in november 1994 in "lisa on ice." a bully types "beat up martin" into a newton, and the newton transcribes it as "eat up martha." the joke was so accurate that apple's own newton team later included an "eat up martha" easter egg in newton os 2.0, after they had rewritten the recognition engine to actually work.

~ the day it died ~

steve jobs came back to apple as interim ceo in september 1997. on february 27, 1998 he announced the newton platform was being shut down. the messagepad 2100 had only been on the market four months. apple had a stake in arm holdings that had been spun out of the newton chip work, and that stake was worth more than apple's losses on the newton division for the rest of the company's existence. the platform itself got nothing.

jobs's stated reasons were the financials and his dislike of styluses. the unstated reason was that newton was sculley's product line, and sculley was the man who had pushed jobs out of apple in 1985. when jobs killed newton he killed eworld and openDoc the same week. it was a clean-up of everything that did not look like the future jobs wanted, which was the consumer mac plus the os x rewrite based on next, plus a small set of unannounced consumer hardware projects.

~ what it became ~

the newton's chip lineage outlived the newton. apple had co-developed the arm610 with arm and dec for the original messagepad, and arm holdings became the cpu architecture inside roughly every smartphone ever shipped, including the iphone. the iphone is more clearly the newton's grandchild than apple usually likes to admit.

the platform itself had a small fan community that kept newtons running for years past the cancellation. the os had a real scripting language, newtonscript, and a working object database that nothing on the market matched until the early 2010s. people who used a newton tend to talk about it the way commodore amiga people talk about the amiga: as a thing that was right and lost.

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