Random Crap Wednesday
Writing by Jose on Wednesday, 19 of March , 2008 at 12:47 pm
This week has been kind of a bummer and will continue to be that way until Monday. My home computer is still down and I just got my confirmation from UPS and my motherboard should be here Monday. So I really haven’t had a whole lot of time to research some “crap” to write about. So I’m pretty much pulling this right out of thin air.
Today’s Random Crap is the “Apple Newton”
Ok… I’m pretty sure I might catch a lot of flack on this one but I’m just putting it out there.
Pulled from Newlaunches.com
Released much ahead of its time in 1993, the Newton (official name was MessagePad) was touted as the future of computing. It would be the first in a new line of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). The Messagepad was the first pen based system running on the Newton Intelligence OS. It was powered by a ARM 610 processor at 20 MHz and 640k RAM / 4 MB ROM. It sported a reflective black and white touchscreen with a resolution of 336 x 240, PCMCIA card slot for expansion and Infrared port for communication between MP’s. The main capabilities of the device was its communications and organizational features. It could fax messages, send e-mail, had applications to organize names, dates, phone numbers, etc, printing, wireless paging and perhaps the most important of all it could supposedly read and recognize handwritten words on the screen. The Newton’s astronomical $ 1000 price tag, poor handwriting recognition, large size (did not fit any pocket) and the “Doonesbury” comic strips by Gary Trudeau pushed it towards failure, however the Apple Newton was produced for six years.
Hmmm… sounds kind of familiar doesn’t it. The iPhone is basically a Newton without written word recognition and it has a phone. It really is amazing how time has an affect on how well a product will work in society. Being that the Newton didn’t have the processing power that handhelds do today and it didn’t work as well as it was supposed to, it just died out. Especially at $1000. That would be like $5000 or more today… lol. Got comments or have you ever used a Newton and would like to share, please leave a comment on this post.
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