Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

On its 30th anniversary, we look at the groundbreaking product's enduring legacy.

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Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a product, it could only be described as a flop. Widely mocked in popular culture at the time, the Newton became a poster child for expensive but useless high-tech gadgets. Even though the device improved dramatically over time, it failed to gain market share, and it was discontinued in 1997. Yet while the Newton was a failure, it galvanized Apple engineers to create something better—and in some ways led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone.

The vision thing

Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976, had wooed marketing guru John Sculley away from PepsiCo to become the new Apple CEO in 1983. However, their relationship broke down, and Jobs resigned from Apple two years later after a bitter power struggle. Although Sculley made Apple profitable by cutting costs and introducing new Macintosh models, he felt lost without Apple’s visionary founder. So when Apple Fellow Alan Kay burst into Sculley’s office and warned him that “next time, we won’t have Xerox” (to borrow ideas from), he took it seriously.

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Apple Knowledge Navigator concept video.

In 1986, Sculley commissioned a team to create two “high concept” videos for a new type of computing device that Apple could conceivably build in the future. These “Knowledge Navigator” promos showed a foldable, tablet-like device with a humanoid “virtual assistant” that interacted via spoken instructions. While some derided the impracticality of these sci-fi vignettes, they fired up Apple employees and got them thinking about the future of computing.

Meanwhile, Apple engineer Steve Sakoman was bored after launching the Macintosh II. He wanted to make a portable device like the pioneering PC laptop he had built for Hewlett-Packard. To stop him from leaving Apple, vice president Jean-Louis Gassee let him set up a “skunkworks” project to pursue his dream. But he didn’t want to just make a Macintosh laptop. He had a vision of a tablet-like device, the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper, that could read people’s handwriting.

The dream starts to slip away

The technology to create such a device didn’t exist when the Newton project began in 1987, so Sakoman contacted AT&T and hired the company to design a low-power version of its CRISP CPU, which became known as the AT&T Hobbit.

Unfortunately, the Hobbit wasn’t nearly as nimble and clever as its namesake. The CPU was “rife with bugs, ill-suited for our purposes, and overpriced,” according to Apple Chief Scientist Larry Tesler. The original Newton design required three Hobbit CPUs to operate, the end-user cost was nearing $6,000, and the device wouldn’t even be ready for at least five years. The handwriting-recognition software, a key selling point for the device, was also progressing slowly.

Development of the Newton had bogged down, and Sakoman started to lose hope that it would ever be finished. In 1990, he left Apple along with Gassee to found Be, Inc., which made its own desktop computers and the BeOS operating system.

The AT&T Hobbit CPU, making its final appearance in a prototype BeBox.

At the same time, another “top secret” Apple division was also working on unique portable devices and software under the code name “Pocket Crystal." Larry Tesler was asked to evaluate this team to see if it might be able to replace the Newton. Instead, he suggested spinning out Pocket Crystal into a separate company (which became General Magic) and refocusing the Newton project with new hardware and new leadership.

A new life for Newton

Apple found a small British computer company, Acorn, which had improbably created a new CPU design that offered decent speeds at impossibly low power requirements. Apple invested $3 million into the company and helped design a new revision of its chip, the Acorn RISC Machine.

The Acorn Archimedes 400, released in 1987, using the new Acorn RISC Machine CPU.

On the software side, Larry Tesler appointed engineer Steve Capps to lead the project. Capps had been an Apple employee during the Macintosh days but left after the computer shipped. Before he left, he was thinking about designs for a pen-based Macintosh, so it was easy to convince him to come back to work on the Newton team.

In an interview with Ars, Capps described his plans for Newton as being “the smartest piece of paper you ever wrote on.” The idea was that you could draw anything on the tablet in free-form but that the system would be smart enough to translate your sketches into both data and commands.

Handwriting recognition was a key part of the plan. Apple found help with this software in an unusual place. An unconfirmed story says that Apple marketing VP Al Eisenstat was visiting Moscow when he heard a knock on his hotel door. A nervous Russian engineer handed him a floppy disk and ran off. The disk contained a demo of handwriting recognition software. In any case, Apple inked a deal with the creator, Stepan Pachikov, who had formed a company called ParaGraph International.

Apple engineer Ernie Beernink was responsible for the Newton’s handwriting recognition effort. In an interview with Ars, Beernink explained, “They asked me to run a competition between the various [handwriting] engines (all against the same set of training/test data), and although there wasn’t a huge difference in recognition rate, it was much safer to go with the ParaGraph recognizer because they had a team of people to support it.”

Steve Capps was in charge of finalizing the Newton’s user interface design. In the early stages, this process involved a lot of paper prototyping, which eventually moved on to mockups of the user interface in HyperCard.

Newton becomes real

The combination of the efficient Acorn CPU and a new vision from Steve Capps and his team brought the Newton project back on track. There were still debates about the final size and form factor of the product, and at one point, there were three different sizes being considered. John Sculley laid down the law when he said that the Newton had to fit inside his jacket pocket. Some of the engineers joked that they wanted to sneak into his house at night and re-tailor his jackets to make the pockets larger.

The Newton was finally demonstrated to the public at the Consumer Electronics Show on May 29th, 1992, although the product was still far from shipping. John Sculley referred to the Newton as a “personal digital assistant,” or PDA, a term he coined at his announcement speech. While the Newton was not the first compact digital organizer to be released, it would end up being the first PDA, simply because the name stuck.

John Sculley demonstrates the Newton at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show.

Time

The product demonstration excited the crowd, and the press went into full hype mode. Some of the features shown at CES, like the ability to draw rough shapes that turned into solid ones that could be dragged around and deleted by scribbling over them, showcased Capps’ vision of being the “smartest piece of paper." But the demo was carefully staged to only show the parts of Newton that worked and to avoid the features that had massive bugs and would cause crashes.

The pressure to deliver the Newton reached a boiling point, and Apple engineers were routinely working 15- to 20-hour days. One engineer, 30-year-old Ko Isono, died by suicide on December 1992. Apple instituted mental health checks and support programs for its employees after the incident.

Finally, after a long and painful development process, Apple announced that the Newton was officially shipping on August 2, 1993.

The product

The Newton MessagePad 100 went on sale for $900 in 1993 dollars, or about $1,800 today. For that money, you received a device that was absolutely innovative and different but which still had many rough edges.

The Newton MessagePad 100, showing off its user interface.

old-computers.net

To interact with the device, you used the included plastic stylus to write on the non-backlit, black-and-white LCD screen. The display was approximately 4.5 inches by 3.5 inches and had a resolution of 240 by 320 pixels.

The primary feature of the device, the handwriting recognition, did not work well out of the box. It had to be trained on a user’s unique writing, and it failed to recognize many words.

This flaw led to a massive backlash in public opinion, and the Newton became the go-to reference for expensive but flawed high-tech gadgets. Doonesbury author Garry Trudeau wrote a series of comic strips in which a character tried to get the Newton to recognize his handwriting, with hilarious results. The Simpsons released an episode in which Nelson Muntz told his friend to “take a note on your Newton.” He wrote, “Beat Up Martin," but the Newton translated it as “Eat Up Martha.”

Garry Trudeau takes a shot at the Newton.

The Simpsons join in the fun.

Simpsons Quotes

The handwriting problems wouldn’t have been fatal by themselves, but the rest of the product failed to live up to the massive media hype and public expectations. With the original Newton, you could take notes, use the calculator, run some simple formulas, update and search contacts in an address book, and keep track of appointments in a calendar. And that was about it.

Some features were ahead of their time. For example, the Newton came with support for reading ebooks a full fourteen years before the launch of Amazon’s Kindle store. Other features would have been amazing, if only the wireless infrastructure had existed to use them. The first 802.11 WiFi standard for computers would not appear until 1997, and cellular phones were still using analog signals. (An optional accessory card did allow messages to be sent via pager.) The Newton came with an infrared port, like those in remote controls, that you could use to “beam” messages and other information from one Newton to another, assuming both owners were in the same room. The primary way to sync your data with your computer was using a wired cable.

The Newton ran its own custom operating system, Newton OS, which was written in C++. It also had its own custom development language, NewtonScript, which allowed third-party developers to create their own applications. These apps didn’t need to be “installed” but could just be copied or beamed onto the Newton, and they would work instantly.

Steve Capps described the development environment as being incredibly advanced. “The whole architecture that we cooked up had no difference between data in the ‘file system’ and in memory (and for Newton, in the ROM that held the code),” he said in an interview with Ars. “Imagine a world today where JavaScript had MySQL as part of it, and there was no difference between storing data locally in a browser versus storing remotely and running code in either place. The data could span the browser and the server but be treated as one record. Conceptually, a developer just had to understand a few basics, and they were off.”

Later versions of NewtonOS were far better at handwriting recognition. It easily recognized my name, despite me scrawling it with a mouse on an emulator.

Apps like the Calculator had a history and universal undo and could be dragged around. Behind the calculator, you can see the Newton making perfect circles out of my imperfect ones.

The calendar’s default page. Sometimes the handwriting recognition would still fail. Here, I’m trying to scribble “write article” multiple times.

The clock and one of the built-in formula converters.

The address and contacts book. If you bought the optional MessagePad Communicator card and subscribed to Apple’s Newton service, you could send pages to people. Remember pagers?

Later versions

The original Newton MessagePad 100 was considered by fans to be merely a “beta test” of what the product would eventually become. The model was replaced with the updated 110 and 120 models—and then the 130, which shipped with Newton OS 2.0. The second major release of the OS came with a massive upgrade to its handwriting recognition systems, a text expander feature that allowed predefined shortcuts to be automatically expanded into full-length text, and the ability to rotate the screen into a landscape orientation and attach an optional keyboard.

Third-party software added many new features to the Newton. There were word processors, spreadsheets, billing software, email applications, validated form entry applications, music composition apps, and games. Over a decade before the iPhone, Apple had a portable device with its own application ecosystem. The best-selling software on the Newton was Graffiti, a simplified handwriting system written by the company Palm, which would go on to make its own PDAs.

The hardware improved dramatically with the release of the MessagePad 2000 in 1997, which bumped the CPU from 20 MHz to 162 MHz and the screen from 240 x 320 to 320 x 480, with 16 shades of gray and a backlit display. This device came with new built-in features as well: The Newton could now display photos and play music files through its internal speaker. The PDA was slowly becoming a multimedia device. A clamshell version with a built-in physical keyboard, the eMate 300, was released for educational customers.

Various models of the Newton, with the 2100 at bottom right and two eMate 300s on top.

Flickr user moparx

Unfortunately, the newer models didn’t dramatically increase sales of the Newton. The public’s perception of the device had solidified with the original model. In the end, only an estimated 200,000 Newtons were ever sold, a number far below Apple’s expectations.

Apple was also going through some difficult times. The company rotated through a series of increasingly ineffective CEOs before buying NeXT and appointing Steve Jobs as the permanent “interim” chief executive. Steve looked at the financials of Apple Computer and determined that he had to clean house. In 1998, Jobs rejected a plan to spin off the Newton as a separate company and cancelled the project entirely.

The Newton’s legacy

Newton says hello to iPhone. iPhone says hello back.

Wikipedia

Today, the Newton is barely remembered. It’s considered a failed project, as it only lasted a few years before being shut down.

But the truth isn't so simple. Many people who worked on the Newton went on to become key players on the iPhone team; Mike Culbert, Greg Christie, and even Jony Ive worked on Newton. Many of the ideas that originated in the Newton made their way into the iPhone and iPad. Some of these are minor, like the “puff of smoke” animation when you delete something, which eventually found its way to the MacOS dock, or the live-updating clock icon that Steve Capps challenged the iPhone team to recreate.

But other influences went far deeper. The Newton had an “intelligent assistant” feature that let you perform tasks using natural language. This showed up again in the form of Siri and Google’s voice assistant. It had a universal search across all data and applications, which was recreated in Spotlight and Google’s own device-searching features. It pioneered the use of validated form-based input, which ended up becoming a huge part of websites and web-based applications. And NewtonScript influenced the creation of JavaScript, with its prototype-based object model, dynamic variable typing, garbage-collected memory, and fast interpreted design. Today, JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world.

And last but definitely not least, the little British firm that created the Acorn RISC Machine CPU spun out its chip into a separate company. The ARM designs ended up powering almost every single smartphone and tablet in the world and became the core of what is today known as Apple Silicon. Not bad for a $3 million initial investment!

There are still folks who use their Newtons today, writing web browsers and designing modern Wi-Fi cards for the little device. Steve Capps owns a few himself but no longer uses them. He’s impressed, however, with the fans who “still believe."

Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

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Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

On its 30th anniversary, we look at the groundbreaking product's enduring legacy.

The vision thing

The dream starts to slip away

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