Love Notes to Newton [video] | Hacker News Reader

Love Notes to Newton [video]

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44 pointsingve20 comments

The Apple Newton, not Isaac Newton.

Wow, the PCMCIA Megahertz dial-up modem shown at 2:22 in the video really brought back some old memories! I hadn't thought about PCMCIA cards in many years. Some of the first computers I used in the 90s were my Dad's work laptops and I thought those cards were so cool! I also remember using some 802.11b wifi cards on some old laptops with OpenBSD in the early 2000s back around the time that OpenBSD had particularly great support for wifi hardware at the time as compared to linux.

Anyways, I don't have anything to add about the Newton; I never owned one, but old technology can bring up some strong positive feelings about simpler times.

The Apple Newton isn't my favorite computer by a longshot, but it is 100% my favorite computer to program for. Developing for it was such a great experience.

I miss the Newton a lot. I think I have a box of a half dozen or so in storage. I should pull them out and play.

The Newton was a fantastic example of a non-Apple product that came from Apple.

Newscript was quite similar how JavaScript turned out to be.

Pity that Dylan failed the internal politics to be used instead of C++, it would probably been quite cool.

I was disappointed to find out this has nothing to do with the great Sir Isaac Newton.

For those equally disappointed, here's a beautiful piece of science history, that culminates with a very famous quote by Johann Bernoulli about Newton: "tanquam ex ungue leonem"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Isaac_Newton#B...

I still have my Newton ... somewhere. I should power it up or something.

Never saw one of these, not sure how they competed but Palm Pilot was much more successful where I was.

The modern equivalent feels to me to be e-ink devices, it still saddens me to no end that apple managed to kill the e-ink market completely with the ipad. It is finally gaining some traction though.

I had a couple of Newtons. And now a ReMarkable tablet. I’ve often thought that if it ran the Newton software it would be perfect(ish).

Compared with Palm, the programming environment was ahead of its time, instead of C with lots of contraints (all those handle based APIs), it was NewtonScript (inspired in SELF), a cool OS architecture, and C++ for when NewtonScript wasn't good enough.

> not sure how they competed but Palm Pilot was much more successful where I was.

The Newton predates the PalmPilot. The main problem that the Newton had was that it was very slow, large, and heavy. The Palm Pilot was a better market solution because it was none of those things. It was also much less capable, but it was capable enough for the market.

Funny story: I had a software company producing commercial Newton software. When the Palm Pilot was released, my attorney brought it to my attention, suggesting that I should target it.

I dismissed it because it was a much less capable machine. He was excited about it because it was affordable, small, and light. In terms of the smart business move, my attorney was 100% right and I was 100% wrong.

Ha, I used to write apps for PalmPilot. We showed them to our accountant one time, along with the website, where we had a 'news' page, where we'd post new releases and other stuff.

The accountant instantly commented, "that's exactly what I want. Not a whole website, just somewhere I myself can post a 'news log'". I dismissed the idea, of course why wouldn't you want a whole website, and for news, you use a mailing list where you can send out an email newsletter.

Blogger came out the following year.

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