[NTLK] Something interesting: LTT on youtube did a review/talk of the Newton

[Matthias Melcher]

> On 5. Sep 2023, at 20:29, Dan <dan at dbdigitalweb.com> wrote:
> 
> Something interesting crossed my feeds today, LTT a tech channel on youtube I have sometimes watched in the past came out with a video on the Newton and comparing it to the iPhone.

Oh wow, that was fun to watch! Thank for the link. I love the impatience and the random tapping if nothing obvious happens on screen for more than 8 milliseconds.

Here is my comment on YouTube:

The biggest downfall of the Newton IMHO was the cost of the developer environment. After spending 1k on the Newton, you had to drop another 1200$US on a graphical programming environment before you could release your first piece of software (assuming you already had a powerful Mac for 3000$US or so). So the entry cost for developers was 5k just for the setup, and the number of customers was very limited. No wonder there were no apps available for a long time. And the few that were, had to be very expensive to promise at least a break-even.

On top of that, software distribution was a hassle via floppy that you stuck into your Mac that then had to sync with the Newton over the wired serial line.

Software authors had to learn NewtonScript as it was the only language available. The IDE was 80% graphical with few text field for snippets of NewtonScript code. The IDE did not support break points or single stepping. A debugging software was part of the driver developer kit which allowed ARM and C code, but was released much later and cost another $600 or so. The fun of cross-compiling C on a 68030 Class Mac and debugging it over a serial line was quite limited.

Finally with the MP2000, the NewtonScript developer kit was ported to Windows 98, hacked, and distributed, generating a tiny hacker scene that wrote mostly demos. If you look at the entire catalog of software that was written for NewtonOS, you find either very specific expensive pieces, like airplane flight maps and route planning, or very very simple stuff games little beyond tic tac toe.

Problem is, the Newton was never meant to be online. It was a mobile device, and back then, mobile data was simply not yet available. Event in the first days of iPhone many years later, very few providers had mobile data, and the prices were per fractional kilobyte and outrageous. Looking at my iPhone today, I have a hard time finding a single piece of software that does *not* connect to the internet besides Calculator. Back then, this was not an option, and as a result, pretty much none of the apps from back then are even remotely useable today. Just as the Telex machine from my Granddads time does not help much in my office today, while still being quite fascinating.

 - Matthias