[NTLK] NewtCOM Dongle: Weekend Update

[Grant Hutchinson]

Hey, Matthias!

Thanks for another update.

Going back to a previous update:

> Oh, and the current working title for the dongle is now NewtCOM.

I wanted to mention something about that name.

Back around 2007, Adriano Angelillis (who developed several innovative Newton accessories and sold them through his Notwen site) posted some information about a multipurpose dongle that he called NewtCom. It never got past the prototype stage, but was basically a dongle for the interconnect port that contained a mini-USB adapter and secondary serial port using an audio jack.

From an email he sent me back in 2016:

“Attached are a decade old pictures of a finished, unpublished product. It used both the serial connections available through the interconnect port. It was just half a inch longer than [my previous] Newton USB Dongle. Feel free to use the pictures as you like. A friend at the time gently developed customized
utilities. These made possible to connect a keyboard or sync a backup over the secondary external serial port.”

The photos aren’t great, but here’s a link to what the prototype looked like:

https://splo.me/bx

g.

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Grant Hutchinson
NewtonTalk List Dad & Web Custodian