Patching the Newton
dadhacker.com
dadhacker.com
It's kind of surprising that a criminal gang hasn't made off with a huge haul of devices on launch day minus one by doing exactly this.
I know that I would probably fall for it or not care enough to stop anyone trying.
Being brazen is incredibly effective. One time, I was stuck stocking the storage area above the shelving units up near the ceiling, and was sitting there waiting for the next load. I literally watched a guy walk in with a red t-shirt, walk to the back of the store, pick up the most expensive computer, and proceed to walk out the entrance doo without paying.
There was also a gang of people who would work out of Chinatown tour busses. About 30-50 Asian tourist types would flood the store on a weeknight, 3-4 people would engage employees while a partner would raid small valuable stuff. One time we lost every USR external modem.
The patches live in the battery protected low-power RAM of the Newton, and they’re theoretically immortal as long as power holds out. This is why the battery compartment has a wacky mechanical locking system meant to discourage people from simultaneously removing both the main and the backup batteries.
Am I the only one who thinks this is an overly fragile way of doing it? It's almost like planned obolescence. (Apple isn't the only one doing this; a lot of very expensive test equipment back then also had things like calibration constants stored in battery-backed RAM.)
Later units had flash chips, and the wacky battery lockout stuff went away (to everyone's relief).
We might have been able to add flash to the first Newton, removed all the wacky battery stuff and had cost parity, but the schedule was so tight that there was no time to make any changes. (I have a write-up of fake deadlines and bad scheduling practices in the various companies I've worked for, I should really finish that...).
Not if users can reinstall the updates themselves, then it's simply inconvenient. Just like the Palm Pilot, which lost all data when the battery went flat, or when you had to reset it after a crash.
It's a heck of a lot easier to replace a lithium battery (even under power) than it is to replace most flash devices.
I used a Newton Messagepad 2000 for five years or so, and recorded meeting notes and contacts almost exclusively on it. (The 2.0 text recognition engine seemed to have been made for my handwriting.) It was a fantastic (but limited) device -- it ran for about a month on a set of alkalines, and actually had decent connectivity (it was one of the few devices that could print using IRDA). I had both the pretty horrible Newton SDK and even a native dev tool (NewtonBASIC) that I messed with from time to time (although it sucked compared to VB).
This was before he caved and used an iPhone smartphone, but we oft discussed how it was just too ahead of its time for the price tag. I think he got it, like other vintage equipment, especially Mac, by going for years to Rutgers University in NJ where his dad works and their IT infrastructure group was selling "this garbage" away because they had it in bulk and could not use it.
How I wish I took him up on his offer to go when we were college buddies. Sadly Rutgers has apparently stopped as he checks every year to check if we have one last shot.
Needless to say, I will peruse eBay to see Sparc workstations. I had no idea as a younger teen what my dad saw, but I same a beautiful minimalism in the design that I would later found out masked unique power and crazy price tags.
It would have been really funny if I caved and bought this thing as teen. I would have no idea how to use it and parts costs would have killed me.