Einstein: NewtonOS running on other operating systems | Hacker News Reader

Einstein: NewtonOS running on other operating systems

github.com

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The Newton had an absolutely brilliant user interface, but its hardware let it down. I wish we had a device similar to the smaller Remarkable tablet, running something like NewtonOS.

(Related: Columbo's Mystery Capers is an amazing and hilarious game from one of the Zork devs that has never been dumped and doesn't exist on any other platform. I hope someone will figure out how to get it off an actual Newton and get it to run on Einstein.)

I played with a friend's ReMarkable 2 tablet a few years ago.

It almost made me weep, it was so primitive and so basic compared to a Newton.

A modern e-ink tablet like that with NewtonOS 2 on it would be a thing of great beauty and elegance.

It looks like Einstein supports Android, so you can try running it on a modern e-ink tablet.

Emulators are fun, but not something I would really want to use for production use. I don't even use WINE much. I only keep it around for WinWord, and I only keep WinWord around for Outline Mode which no FOSS (or MacOS) word processor supports any more.

Now I have LogSeq, I don't even need outline mode for note-taking. LogSeq is lovely but it's for notes, not for long-form writing.

I hope sometime this can be added to Infite Mac https://infinitemac.org/

I still have my Newton eMate next to me on my desk. It makes for a surprisingly decent distraction-free writing machine and looks like something from a strange Cronenbergian alternate future.

At some point I’d like to do a casemod with it, but it feels wrong as the thing still works fine.

Incidentally, if anyone’s got a broken one I’d be very interested…

The EL backlight adds to the slightly unearthly vibe too. The eMate was one of the last mainstream laptop-size devices made with an EL backlight. I miss those.

Wow, I remember this. My Dad won a Apple Newton MessagePad 100 and I loved using it as a kid to draw. While I appreciated the ability to write notes, I found having to enter letters one using the special character input was too much friction for regular use. You basically had to learn some of your ABCs when writing letter by letter. Sadly the device was not really used by either my Dad or I because it was too much hassle to relearn how to write.

Rather miss the notepad-central-UI --- I'd take more notes on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ if it had a similar facility for writing and scheduling and so forth.

Man, I loved my Newton 120 - although I wish I could have gotten a 2000.

NewtonScript and the overall filesystem/DB combination was "amazing" and honestly I have missed that "endless-integration-possibilities" ever since.

I loved the Newton in all forms, both the tiny laptop which I consider the Pocket Reform to be a development on, and the handheld pdas. Keeping it alive is very important.

> We cannot distribute the ROM file

Intellectual property needs to be shot behind the chemical shed

The OS was kind of cool, even if Dylan missed the boat, the mix of NewtonScript with C++ was still kind of cool, and on its last days a JIT was being introduced.

Yet another device ahead of its time.

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