[NTLK] Museum of Failure as Journalists

[Matthias Melcher]

> On Jan 27, 2024, at 13:08, Larry Yaeger <larry.yaeger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Jan 26, 2024, at 10:08 PM, Jeff Sheldon <jeffsheldon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Given how permissive the soup approach is (and representative of the time it was designed), how do you think that might have evolved in an emerging world of zero-trust?
> 
> With trusted apps, I'd expect the data being shared to be mostly trustable.  However, crackers being crackers and software developers being mere humans, I could imagine buffer overflow attacks and other problems coming from bad data delivered by a trusted app.

But Soups are exactly what we do today. Just like pretty much everything else that the Newton initiated, we are doing today. We just gave it different names. Newton was limited by what was technically available. Touchscreen were simply not invented yet. Mobile data was not available at all, especially not in the US where lots of mobile phones were still analog. GSM was the first digital standard introduced in Europe in 1990 for digital messaging of up to 160 characters. It's no surprise that NewtonOS did not consider mobile internet.

What Soups started is now the Cloud. Of course apps share your address book, just not through a local Soup, but via the Cloud. Access control was not neccessary so much back then because it was local, but it's just a logical consequence of Cloud/Soup approach.

Modern devices don't have NewtonScript, because NS was super minimal to fit the memory requirements, but JavaScript and Python are so similar to NewtonScript, they may have used it as a template. The language concept are the same, it (optionally) compiles into byte code, just like NS. Heck, we could probably write a converter from NS to Python without losing any functionality. Swift and Java are statically typed, but the concept of being CPU independent through byte code is just like NewtonScript.

The concept of having a big screen and no hardware buttons? Newton did that.

An assistant that understands natural language? Newton did that.

I think that maybe besides Inbox/Outbox, which was owed to the lack of internet access, every concept that the Newton introduced is still very much around today and thriving. Newton was not a *commercial* success in itself, but it was absolutely not a failure.


PS: even the fax feature is still a very valuable asset, as in some countries that insist on staying in the digital stone age, fax is the best and sometimes only way to communicate with a public offices. Yes, I am talking about you, German local tax offices, police stations, youth welfare offices, district courts, ...