This may have come before this. I would argue that the iPhone's true ancestor was actually this. While the iPhone eventually made everything that came before it look obsolete, the Apple Newton didn't quite catch on in the same way. And when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he immediately killed it. But what you might not realize, this thing has way more in common with your smartphone than you probably think. All touchscreen, all the time, it runs on an RMSOC and it can even access the internet. In this video, I'll be getting my first hands-on with one of Apple's biggest Titanics and we'll be seeing how much of its DNA we can recognize in its far future successor. We're also gonna see who sponsored this video. Build Redux, they build fully customizable gaming PCs suitable for any budget. Yes, even off the beaten path budgets. Pick your favorite games and see how they perform using their online PC builder. Head to the link below and create your new rig today. If you've heard of the Apple Newton, chances are you are at least as old as I am, very geeky, an Apple fan, or most likely some combination of the three. It's one of the first PDAs or personal digital assistants ever and possibly even the first with a stylus. It's also the one to coin the term PDA. Newton was a weird product. It was one of those ones that launched in the era when Steve Jobs was in exile at NeXT Computer and the idea was kind of actually pretty smart to take a powerful but efficient ARM SoC, put it in a small aesthetically pleasing package. Okay, well, that part's arguable. And then use it to make a sort of digital notepad, address book and planner all in one compact little box. Why not a mobile phone, you ask? These things take time and text messaging didn't even exist yet. If you look at the original Newton message pad though, it does kind of look an awful lot like the iPhone later did, doesn't it? It's all screen, it's driven by touch input and it's got that bar shape that we're all familiar with today. This message pad you're looking at right here is among the last that Apple released in 1997. And while the screen is off right now, it does actually work. I just don't know how to turn it on because this is my first time ever touching it but I'm assuming it's the slider, ah, okay. It was actually that easy. Wow, that screen is not very bright. It is not backlit. There is a light though. If you hold down the slider, indiglo. No way, ah, I love it. I mean, it's not gonna do anything for the glare. I think I have a solution to that. Do we have any of those little rubber pucks? Get poked and I can almost read it. All the viewing angles aren't that bad. That's actually true. What display technology is this? This is actually an LCD. It is 16 color gray scale, 480 by 320. Huh, that is really good for the time. Yeah, it was really expensive for the time. A lot of it was advanced for the time. It used a strong arm 110 processor. It had one megabyte of RAM and a whopping four megabytes of flash RAM with battery backing. That's right friends, we didn't have persistent storage at least affordably for consumers back then. So if your battery died and then your other more different secondary battery died, your PDA would completely wipe. Yeah, so don't open the battery bay unless we have it plugged into the wall. Unfortunately, that's just how it goes. The internal battery, if there ever was one, I'm not sure is dead. So it says four double A's in a carrier. Yes. That's how this was powered, hilarious. I won't be opening this door then, but we can look at the rest of the IO. We've got not one, but two PCMCIA slots. You can see we've populated one of them with eight megabytes of flash storage. We've got a second one that we'll be using for a wifi card. We did find an old enough wireless router that we could connect this thing to it. Got a speaker on the front, infrared, love that. Gotta transfer some files over the air. And of course, Apple's got a proprietary serial port, a DCN jack, wow, so you plug it in at the top. Integrated stylus storage though, that's nice to see. It's so funny to me how Apple was the first with a stylus and now they hate the idea of them so much that they won't even call their stylus a stylus. No, no, it's a pencil. You wanna see something really cool? Okay, there's a hole. Is that to hold my, oh, shut up. That's to hold my stylus while it's sitting on my desk like this? Yes. That is absolutely hilarious. It's actually pretty useful if you're using it on the desk. Like when I was using it to try and set it up for this shoot, instead of having it rolling around on my desk, I just put in that and it's fine. Brilliant. Yeah. It has a mic in? It does have a mic, yes. You can make voice recordings. And in fact, with a modem, you could make calls. But you'd need a PCMCIA modem and you'd need to be plugged into the wall. Well, yes, you would. Oh my gosh. The cruise card by U.S. Robotics. That would have been actually a pretty good modem back in the day. Now that's a name I've not heard in a very long time. We won't be using this though. We're gonna be using- Right, we don't have anything to plug into that. This Orinoco Wi-Fi card, 11 megabit, 802.11b. Let's go. It supports WEP 128 bit. Lucent Wavelength IEEE. As modern as some aspects of it are though, I gotta say, I'm glad that we've moved on from these soft touch coatings. Have we though? They're still around sometimes. They do not last. I tried to clean it. That's clean. I've hit it with Windex. It won't come off. It's just pushing around. It's not a cleaning issue. It's just that it just turns into shmoo. Yeah, it's actually reduced, like reverting back into the SAP from the rubber tree. Of course it's proprietary. You need an adapter for this if you want to use a peripheral or sync to a PC or Mac. My script says it's unobtainium, but you appear to have one. Yes, a viewer actually allowed us to loan one. We can't buy one to save our lives. They're not on eBay. They're not on Facebook Marketplace. They only existed for this generation in 1997 until they were discontinued in 1997. The funny thing is it's not just serial. It was originally meant to break out into multiple different protocols, including serial, but also audio out. This kind of looks like it would do PS2? Close. It would do Apple desktop bus. So the old keyboard standard that they had, you can actually plug in a keyboard to the Newton. The older Newtons just had that. They didn't have the Newton interconnect port as it's called. That's a view button. So basically it changes the current view. In this case, it goes from the note itself to I think a list of notes, and that will show you the notes that have been saved up there if you click on that. Oh, what a cute little clock keyboard. Ooh. Oh, now you're- It sounds like a typewriter. The delay is really good. You're using the onscreen keyboard, but there's another way to input text. Okay, this I know, but only because I've been watching old Simpsons reruns lately. Actually last night, I watched the infamous episode where I think Jimbo tries to write something on the screen of his Newton, and then ends up hucking it at Martin because it works so poorly. So let's see, let's see if it can recognize my writing. Newton. Okay. Actually kind of usable. I'm speeding up a little bit now. Oh, okay, we're starting to run into trouble. And it doesn't do cursive. It does, you have to switch the mode. Ah, okay. Now, if you want to delete something, you can just draw a, almost like a W, like a zigzag, just a sharp zigzag of at least four segments. Yeah, so cute. And if you need to adjust one character, you can just write over it. Needs to be at least four times. Oh yeah, okay, that worked. I was just in a different text input mode. I was in ink text. Hello. Yeah, that's sort of garbage. I wrote cursive, and then it just takes an image of what you wrote, and then it just plunks it all next to each other. So that way you can just write in the same spot, and it'll... If you, okay, so if you open up the text modes, then hit the I, I think, down at the bottom left. Are you saying this didn't catch on? No, it didn't catch, I don't know. So then you can change it from, yeah, so you need to change the mode directly to cursive. Hello, how, how, how long? Oh my goodness, my cursive is terrible. It's supposed to learn your writing over the course of several weeks or months. I will try, we'll try. Let's try to, okay, do this. This would not be a time saver. Well, yeah, there's a reason why on-screen keyboards took off. How do I get to a home screen or something? That is the home screen. So it's just a note thing? What do you mean by home screen? You want like apps or something like that? Yeah, are there apps? Yeah, if you go to extras. Ooh, extras. Ooh! All sorts of stuff you can look at. Right there is the unfiled icons. Unfiled icons is basically whatever you have it categorized. If you touch the tab title, you'll get a little pop-up menu. Ooh! You can see other things. Games. Okay, I mean, it was inevitable, wasn't it? Yeah, it is. No way, it is full of games. When did Apple start hating gamers? Well, to be fair, they weren't preloaded. I had to load them in myself. They existed though. They did exist. Rocks in space, that has to be Asteroid. That's kind of part of the problem with all this software is that it is very old. Registering it is not straightforward anymore. So all of this is pretty much demos. I've noticed that some of them have decided that the trial is over after I launched them once. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Did you try this one? I have not. This is the first time I've ever played it or seen it play it. You hold to rotate and then hold to go forward. And then you can like hold to rotate. This is terrible. Well, there's only so much you can do with a stylus. I mean, it's not like touch screens would ever catch on, right? Frogs versus cars. Who will win? Oh, great. Dad. Oh, man. These are really, really, really picky tiny controls. What the crap? Oh, I've not played a lot of Frogger. This is not Frogger. It is legally distinct from Frogger. It is frogs versus cars. Yeah, I don't think they get as far as taking on the cars. I would like to make a voice recording. That's another very modern functionality that this thing had. So you would go, I think it might actually be in the main notes app. There should be a way to change the stationary. You're recording. Hey, after our conversation at the golf course, I thought that maybe we would have a follow up discussion about the... Yeah, it sounds like poo poo. Yep. Cool. That's like, what is it like? Probably eight kilohertz or 11 kilohertz, something like that. Maybe. Yeah. I definitely am 8,000 in pain right now, so it could be eight kilohertz. You can doodle on it though. You can. If you go to the top right, I think it should be under unfiled or something like that. Wow, you could fax it. You could beam it via IR. Yes. Wow. You could beam it to other Newtons with IR or to a printer to print it. Or I could just delete it. Or you could delete it. Cause that's under send for some reason. That would never cause a problem having the delete button right next to the copy button. Hey, lttstore.com. Let's go. I had to get it in there somehow. Yeah, don't go to that address. I don't know what any of that is. You can actually enable a drawing mode that does like vector shapes. That actually lets you adjust to the points of the vector shapes. So if you can't get it quite right with just the stylus, which is a little fiddly, it's not super accurate all the time in every corner of the Newton. Oh yeah, I see it. Yeah, and you can resize stuff. In fact, if you hold on anything, just like touch and hold after that. Okay, so when it squeaks, what that's doing is highlighting. So anything you highlight will be selected and this is system-wide, including text. So with this selection, you can now move it, scale it. Let's make a stubby screwdriver. Oh, the stubby. That's more like the precision screwdriver. Well, undo, undo. I think the next thing for us to do is to connect this bad boy to the internet. No, I think the next thing to do is to try the keyboard. Shut up, we got the keyboard? Yeah, the same person who lent us this also lent us this. No way. I'm not even, you know, a huge Apple history geek or anything like that. I didn't even really know about this thing other than that I saw a picture of it a couple of times. This is pretty cool. I'm a little confused as to what exa... No way. No way. This is what holds it up. It has the sharp side of a hook and loop fastener and the soft side, so it could be any angle you want as long as it's this angle. It's the precursor to the magic keyboard and the folio. No way. But wait a second, can you switch it to landscape mode? You sure can. It should be noted by the way, everything is done with the stylus. I cannot use my fingers. Resistive, not capacitive. You can use your fingernail, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's not very good. Where are you going? Auto dock. No. Okay, sorry. If you go to the, just close out of that. No. Close out of that. It's like herding a cat. Why would you herd a cat? Cats are nice. I wouldn't herd a cat. That's what you said. No, I said herd, like gnu herd. I heard you. Right there on the bottom, there is rotate. Okay, because that's a perfectly reasonable place for that. Rebuilding display. The button bar couldn't hold all the icons. The overflow will show an unfiled icons. The button bar is what you were using to interact with like the extras and stuff. Yeah. That's basically like the dock. When you change orientations, there's more or less space for that. I have a keyboard now, which means I can, okay, so I, how do I? Oh, okay. No, no, let me figure it out. Let me figure it out. I can do it. It's Apple. It just works. Text. No, no, I'm gonna figure it out. Do I have to power this thing on or what? Let the record show that I tried to say something. Okay, I don't know how to do it. I don't either. Oh. Either it doesn't work. It doesn't work with this Newton or there's something I'm missing. I looked at the manual. I didn't really see anything about it. I presume it's supposed to. Yeah, it's just, sorry. I presume that it's supposed to just work. This is just more Velcro? Are you kidding me? The 90s was the Velcro era. I would like to internet now. This is how you will internet. That, this is an airport. One of the early models. It actually has a three and a half millimeter jack at the bottom so you can stream media over it. It was kind of forward thinking in that way, but it's old enough that it can actually associate with this card because this card is too old to connect to our new access points. Even if I turned off authentication, it just will not connect. Not at home, not here. It has to be something old. Card. Sort of. That's where you would go to set it up. I've already done that. Oh, okay. Actually it was a couple of different places you need to set up the internet on this thing. It's not meant for this. It was never built for wifi. But if you go to- Apple talk. Connect using Lucent. Sure. Wow. That's a, that's a list. Yeah. Again, this is more set up where you want to go. I want to go to dock. Go to the tab. Yes. Yes. Internet. Yes. No way. Now try using courier. Welcome to the old internet. Okay. Oh, that probably remembered the same page that I had loaded up previously. What you're going to want to do is maybe refresh the page. Try that. Using wifi card. Connect. And we should blink in lights. No way. Check in his watch. Yeah. This, this is gonna, this is gonna take a second. This is wireless B and this thing has one megabyte of RAM. That's a million bytes. It is. Well, a million. That's a million of them. But it's just more than that actually. Yeah. It's 1024 of them times 1024 of them. There's thousand, 1024 of the 1024. No, no, no. I got it. I'm gonna let you finish, but this is actual text characters streaming in onto this page. Can I move this window? Yeah. You should. Yep. Well it's, yeah. It's currently like kind of busy ish. Enter chat room. Every single time it has to reconnect and grab a new IP address. Pretty much. Yeah. Loading a webpage is basically like loading a document to this thing. Everything's a document. Every time you load a webpage, it's a new document. And so here we are. Well, that's a pretty bad experience. How about my calendar? Maybe my, oh wow. Stop. There has never been a time when networking was good. Okay. Okay. I think it might be. I think it's crashed. Yeah. No. Okay. That's okay. Oh wow. It's very confused now. Now we get to troubleshoot. It's not actually that bad. Open up the back door. Well, I mean, it's just take the door off the back. There's a reset button there. Hey, we're back. Yeah. It's going to do a bunch of stuff right now. Basically it's listing everything that's on the flashcard and also whatever else might be installed. What were we going to do next again? Calendar. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. I'm going to make an event. Oh yeah. Wow. These are some very random sound effects. They're pleasant. Yeah. But why would you play a different sound effect when I hit the same button? Look at this. I'm going to press up a bunch of times. Yeah. Well, what it's doing is it's playing the same sound effect, but pitching it differently. That way it doesn't get monotonous. Instead of like beep, beep, beep, beep. It's fun. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. What is this A? That might be the carrot. Oh yeah. What's the carrot? Basically it's just where the text entry would be if you turned on the keyboard. If you can actually summon the keyboard by double tapping the screen. Yes. That was terrible. Okay. Well I just want to create a calendar event. New. New meeting. Oh, new event. Ooh, title. Oh, balls. L-T-X. Yeah. I set the date. One fun thing about the date. It doesn't like dates after 2010. There's actually a community patch that is installed to let us run 2023 and beyond. If you try 2010, it'll like revert back to the nineties or something or earlier. The like days until we'll just like overflow and it's a whole thing. So this is the enhanced experience that nobody ever got back in the day. L-T-X. Here we go. Here we go. I think I got this. Oh, unenter. Ooh, alarm. One day. I repeat every year. Cool. This feels very familiar. Yeah. They've even got the little mini view of the month. Oh yeah. All day events just appear at the top. So you can see the details. Okay. What if we have a new meeting? Ooh, start time. Hello? Oh, okay. Definitely PM. Ooh. Oh wow. You got to, boy, do you ever have to stylus very precisely? Invitees. I could invite Emily Young. Hey, look at that. Well, how are you going to get this invitation? Well, I mean, when you sync it to your computer, your computer will pull it into its calendar and then you can send off an email invite. Wow. So convenient. Oh damn it. I hit the wrong little X that was right there. Or you could beam it via IR to another Newton. That's why me and my friends all bought Newton's. A NES emulator exists? Uh oh. I forgot I put that in there. Oh, no way. No way. No way. Okay. NES Mario Brothers. Boop. Sorry. Problem has occurred. Oh. Yeah. Problem has occurred. I'm not playing my damn game right now. No way. Wait, whoa. Look at these controls. This is my D pad. What the flip is frigging happening? It's like pausing the whole thing whenever I press a thing. Did this just crap? Oh. What is A and A hold and A auto? A hold basically means you're holding down the A button. A is just a quick A tap. So like a frame of A. Just because you can't really have those nuances so much with a stylus, I guess. I don't know why. Speaking of nuances, the D pad, I think is continuous. Once you touch it, it keeps going in that direction. That's what the middle button is for, is to stop your movement. Also, there's a sound button down in the bottom left. This is quite possibly the single worst thing I've ever seen. Could you legitimately say that if you had this back in the day, that you would not have appreciated that? Oh, I'd have played games. Not this one. I wouldn't have played a platformer. As limited as this thing seems today, though, the specs on it were pretty monstrous for the time. The Palm Pilot, which came out at around the same time, ended up being much more successful, but had as little as half a megabyte of memory, though it came at a lower price, which probably has something to do with its success, even though it had other limitations, like even though both of them rely on the stylus for input, Palm Pilot only recognized a special graffiti alphabet. The Newton's claim to fame from day zero has been what Apple called calligraphy, though. Actually, as I dug deeper after the shoot, it turns out that the modern telling of this story online is shockingly inconsistent. Like the best I can determine from sources of the time is that the Newton's first generation used a licensed cursive recognition system called Calligrapher from Dr. Stepan Pachikov's Paragraph International. The second generation system used in our MessagePad 2000 was based on an early machine learning technology and called Rosetta, later renamed Mondello because that name was already in use. That was developed in-house by Apple's advanced technology group led by Larry Yeager and went on to become Inkwell in macOS. The more you know. Recognition software that would learn your handwriting over the course of weeks or months. With the Newton, you could write anywhere on the screen and this functionality would later make its way into macOS and iPadOS. The only problem and the problem that may have killed the whole product line, Steve Jobs being angry about anything that happened at Apple while he was gone aside, is that handwriting recognition was not very good on the first models. An example of over-promising and under-delivering. While an on-screen keyboard could be used and the recognition would improve in Newton OS 2.0, physical keyboards were such a common accessory that Apple launched the E-Mate line with a keyboard built in and the 2000 line, like this one, would ship with those in the box. Now, Steve Jobs, who never forgave John Sculley, the CEO who ousted him and greenlit the Newton, did end up canceling the product line not long after he retook the reins in 1997. But while he might not have liked the stylus, famously quipping that were born with 10 of them, he was almost certainly inspired by the device, saying that there was really good technology that was fucked up by management and shutting it down was more about freeing up good engineers to work on a new mobile device. As the story goes, the concept for the iPhone began in 1999 and grew out of the perception that PDAs and mobile phones would converge, which turned out to be absolutely correct. By that time, the first true Blackberry devices were on the horizon and mobile phones had already taken on a more conventional candy bar shape with pixel-based LCD screens rather than the fixed segmented displays that came in the past. This meant that text messaging and basic functions like address books, calendars, and note-taking were now widely available right on a phone, albeit with kludgy T9 dialing. Now, while Wikipedia lists the Newton's successor as the first-gen iPad, and the department head is actually the same person who pitched the Newton in the first place, it's pretty clear that the concepts, the design know-how, and a lot of the features that made the Newton unique directly morphed into the iPhone first. And a lot of that DNA is still in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and yes, whether we like to admit it or not, Android fans, even Android. Just like I'm still present to tell you about our sponsor. 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If you enjoyed this video, go check out our recent video on weird old phones from the 90s and 2000s for a bit more context on, I don't know, how grateful to Apple we should be for bringing us the iPhone. Cause things were headed in a pretty direction at one point.
