🎄💾🗓️ Day 6: Retrocomputing Advent Calendar - Apple Newton eMate 300 🎄💾🗓️

The eMate 300 was a before-Chromebook education-centric "laptop" by Apple, designed specifically for education as a low-cost laptop running the Newton OS. Released in 1997, it featured a 6.8-inch 480x320 grayscale touchscreen, a stylus, and a compact keyboard. It had a 25 MHz ARM 710a processor and built-in rechargeable batteries that could last up to 28 hours (I did not get that on ours, though). It was less powerful than the Newton MessagePad 2000, which was out at the same time however - the eMate had internal memory expansion and a PCMCIA slot for accessories like modems and Ethernet cards. Best of all, it had the translucent ascetic, which was popular then and built for classroom use. There were unreleased purple, clear, red, and orange versions, but we have yet to see those in real life.

Obviously, you don’t. Let the little guys do what they do well, and add layers as needed to do the sexy stuff, which, after all, is consistent with our power-miser philosophy (when we’re asleep, we need vigilant nodes, not animated GIFs).

With Digital Ocean’s Tarpon wireless Newton and a wired unit for the helm, along with software wizardry from Chris Burmester and Allpen’s Erik Browne, we quickly evolved a clean custom layered control console that allowed pen control over the entire system; see Figure 3. In the turret view shown, touching any point on the circle around the boat moves the selected camera to that angle. Drawing an arc shades the selected region and scans the camera at whatever speed is selected by the slider. Other views control VCR or ham radio, display bargraphs of environmental sensors, and so on — one even lets us create macros (or presets) of Forth commands, name them, and select from a pick list. All tools simply send ASCII strings in response to touches, or convert received variables into graphs and icons.

—Steven K. Roberts, N4RVE

1. What is a Newton?

Basically, a Newton is a portable personal digital assistant (PDA) and computing platform developed and marketed by Apple in the 1990s. Newton is also a general name given to any handheld and portable device that runs the Newton OS, including those manufactured by third party companies who licensed the technology from Apple.

Newton devices include a stylus which is used to input data and interact with the user interface via a touchscreen. Handwriting recognition facilitates the conversion of digital “ink” created using the stylus into live text. The operating system includes built-in applications for taking notes, organizing lists, managing contacts, as well as setting reminders and appointments.

Apple held their first Newton Platform Development Conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center, December 7-8, 1993, with three “tracks” : International Newton Marketplace, Orientation to Newton Development, and Advanced Newton Development.

The International Newton Marketplace track was the “business” track for Newton development. Apple and other vendors discussed: solutions for the enterprise, PCMCIA as a delivery vehicle, vertical market applications, StarCore and other distribution options, and Newton in the world market.

The Orientation to Newton Development track was meant for those that have used Newton, but didn’t know about how to develop for it. Apple had discussions entitled: Introductions to Newton Programming, NewtonScript, View System & Prototypes, Soups & Stores, Newton Connection to the Desktop, and Building Electronic Books.

The Advanced Newton Development track discussed: advanced NewtonScript programming techniques, communications & routing, application design & performance tuning, intelligent assistance, debugging your Newton application, and leveraging system services.

There was also the Motorola sponsored party and of course, Newton Jeopardy - testing Newton development knowledge.

One of the most interesting things at this conference was the mix of people. Typically, a developers’ conference is almost entirely male computer engineers. This conference was quite different in two ways. Not only were more women in attendance than in the past, there were also many people who knew more about content and potential solutions than they did technical development issues. Apple will eventually be developing tools for Newton so that end-users can build solutions for themselves and others.

"Our approach with the new company logo was to create an image which would help build market awareness for Newton, Inc. as an independent entity, while retaining the spirit of the original Newton Light Bulb logo," said Keith Yamashita.