Comments on: Newton Storage History

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:47:09 +0000

This is a cool story – I remember that I read a feature story about the Newton storage system in a Byte magazine around that time…

I had already been programming for about a decade at that point, but the complexity of the Newton OS and the number of brand-new concepts in the code was staggering to me. You are my hero! :-)

By: Morgan Aldridge

Morgan Aldridge — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:17:03 +0000

This is such a great story! Please contact Paul Potts and get this, and any others you may have, added to the new Newton project on Folklore.org:

http://folklore.org/ProjectView.py?name=Newton

See Paul’s recent announcement to the NewtonTalk mailing list:

http://marc.info/?l=newtontalk&m=120633234403859&w=2

By: DadHacker: working on Newton storage « Newton Poetry

DadHacker: working on Newton storage « Newton Poetry — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:33:22 +0000

[...] DadHacker: working on Newton storage Pretty cool post over at the DadHacker.com blog everyone seems to be excited about these days (and for good reason – his Donkey Kong story is a trip). Seems the author was one of the original developers on the MessagePad: There was a lot of great technology hidden away in the guts of Newton. I worked on some other pieces that were neat, but this is what I’m most happy about having shipped. It was a lot of fun to work on. Newton was one of those projects I always felt it was a privilege to be part of. [...]

By: Matthias

Matthias — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:03:54 +0000

Thanks for this great article. You probably know about the Newton emulator “Einstein”. The emulator works quite wel (great work by Paul Guyot!)l, but is too slow to run on most PDAs. Which is why I started to rewrite parts of Newton OS, using the known Netwon API’s. I know, this is probably an endless project, but it’s fun nevertheless.

Feel free to peek into the source code at code.google.com or download the disk image. Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

Matthias

By: NAL

NAL — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:54:56 +0000

You did an amazing job with the technology that you had. Only just a year ago, I wrote the majority of my PhD dissertation from an eMate 300 that I bought at a recycled computer store for $10 because I couldn’t afford a laptop and couldn’t take most of my research materials outside of the library. The formatting was done with MS Word after the fact, of course.

Obviously I wish I owned an MP2100 because the eMate’s processor is so slow, but still, the machine is remarkably resilient. I did have some flash memory corruption once that caused one of those crazy backlight-flashing errors, but a brain wipe did the trick.

By: desp

desp — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:11:34 +0000

Thanks for writing this. I remember being highly impressed with the way storage worked on my MP2100.

Please write more about your experiences at Apple.

By: Brant Sears

Brant Sears — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:59:11 +0000

I was a Newton programmer for a few years writing medical records software. The persistent storage solution on the newton was really wonderful. I remember working with it very fondly. It was my first real job as a professional programmer. Our company made versions of our software for Newton and Windows CE. We only had one Newton engineer (me) and many Windows engineers. I was always able to keep the newton product ahead of CE despite working alone because of the tremendously powerful APIs of the the Newton. Even a year after cancelation our Newton software was far outselling the Windows version. I am a professional software developer today because I truly fell in love with the Newton and I like to think that a little bit of the design philosophy of the Newton rubbed off on me.