More sexiness — and eventually a striptease
The MessagePad 120, like all of its Newtonian brethren from the OMP to the MessagePad 2100, had a 5/12V PCMCIA Type II slot. Ejecting a PCMCIA card — as per normal at the time — was a mechanical affair, accomplished by pushing a knurled tab.
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The MessagePad 120 was hardly a multimedia device, so a 2MB PCMCIA card would hold a hefty number of items. Non-bundled applications, as The Dude might say, would "abide" on a PCMCIA card.
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A snug li'l rubber cover protected both the MessagePad 120's power-adapter port and its...
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...standard Appleonian round, eight-pin, mini-DIN serial port, which supported RS422/LocalTalk connections.
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Just to make things difficult — and cheap — Apple didn't put a simple on/off switch on the MessagePad 120, but instead used a "slide-to-start" spring-loaded number. Although I would have preferred a simpler set-up that could have sensed when startup had occurred, I could have lived with this pusher if it had been a bit more positive in its response.
Ah, the FCC-compliance notification. Some aspects of electronic devices do remain essentially the same, even after 15-plus years.
Next page: Software and soup
COMMENTS
In a way this was _far_ more advanced than the iPhone/iPad
Back then, they actually thought about making a pen-based users interface. For example as far as I have seen, you could just write a name anywhere and select it to get the address of the person behind it. It actually tried to do more with the computer than just emulating physical devices.
That first false dawn
As it happens, I went to visit Apple on a fact-finding mission as the Newton team was being disbanded, and interviewed leading players. I was looking at different systems; the focus wasn't Newton but General Magic's "Magic Cap." We looked at a number of other systems too, focusing on PDA and mobile media technologies.
Magic Cap pioneered the approach that Apple used with iPhone - building a community of network operators. It showed promise, but it was seriously flawed, and the dead hand of operator control had the inevitable result.
At that time, Microsoft's abysmal WinCE was both confident and victorious. It was puny, unimaginative and annoying but it leveraged Windows and Office. But it always looked like the past, not the future. It wasn't good, it wasn't loveable, it was just there. Newton had the glimmers of loveability, but the tech was flawed and Apple just didn't _get_ networking.
I love the way that Apple has re-invigorated the smartphone world. To me, iPhone and Android look like today - they capture the best of what was already forming all those years back. But I'm still waiting for something that looks like tomorrow, and I have a suspicion that neither Apple nor Google has the vision for the jump from lean and useable touch OS to something truly new.
titular announcement
Oi!
As an Amiga user, I resent being called an Amigo. Some (most?) of us prefer being called Amigans. Stop trolling the commentards, please :)
June 1996
Just as the MP120 disappeared, we saw the launch of the US Robotics (Palm) Pilot - I knpw this date because the diary on my Palm phone starts in July 1996. Owing a massive debt to its chunky predecessor, it had three huge advantages:
[1] Form factor - it would slip into a shirt pocket. The real test of a PDA is: "have you got it with you, right now?" - the Newton was too bulky and heavy to pass this test, more like a modern netbook or iPad.
[2] Handwriting recognition - Newton's system was a great idea, but neither the software nor the processing power were up to the job. Effective handwriting recognition remains a significant challenge for today's PCs. Palm selected Graffiti, which isn't true handwriting recognition since it requires the use of stylised forms for letters, but minimised the processor requirements.
[3] Simple, out-of-the-box synchronisation with Windows - so that losing your PDA was no longer a world-ending event like losing your Filofax, and content changes made on your Pilot were reflected on your PC (and vice versa).
