
Very much like early Macintosh software," he says.
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Hutchinson was a graphics man, and when he first picked up the Newton, he was most impressed by the software interface that provided a window into Apple's device. >'There was nothing else you could compare it to, unless you were living in the MIT Media Lab.'įor people like Hutchinson, the Newton was - and still is - a remarkable feat of engineering. "I used it for years before I ever owned a laptop." "It was my everyday note-taking, address book, and calendaring device," he says. Through the late '90s, he carried it with him everywhere. It wasn't until 1996, after Apple released a later incarnation of the device, the MessagePad 120, that Hutchinson bought his own - at a discounted price. And by that night, Hutchinson had it in his hands. He didn't buy a Newton - "not everyone can drop $1,000 on a new toy," he says - but his boss did. In the summer of 1993, he worked as a designer and developer for a small Canadian software company called Image Club Graphics, and on the day Apple unveiled the handheld at Macworld in Boston, he was manning the Image Club booth on the show floor.
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Grant Hutchinson was there for the birth of the Newton. That's what moves it from commerce vocation to art." A Personal MIT Media Lab "There's no longer any real practical reason to use the technology," he says, "but people choose to do it anyway - solely because of a personal relationship with the technology. If you repair a new device, Smith says, it's a vocation.
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"There was a guy who gave a presentation on how to do a Getting Things Done system on the Newton." But hacking a Newton is not unlike restoring a printing press or an old automobile. Every hemisphere was represented."Īt first, this seems inexplicable. "The Worldwide Newton Conference is about 25 people, as it turns out," he says. Walter Smith - who worked at Apple in the 1980s and '90s and helped build the NewtonScript programming language - attended the conference when it came to San Francisco in 2006.

Photo: Sandra Garcia/WIREDĮvery so often, people like Hutchinson and Guyot come together for what they call the Worldwide Newton Conference. To realize, in other words, that not everything about computers was worse in the past.The Lake Tahoe Hiking Newton.

I would just encourage you to pick up a MessagePad one day, feel its presence in your hand, and realize, as I have, that while you wouldn’t trade it with your iPhone for all the sapphire on all the Watches in all the world, its friendly, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-like bulk is in many ways more gratifying and affable. Ultimately, there is no solution to the dichotomy-that of liking computers that are slim, light and powerful, but missing the delicious physicality of vintage machines with their buxom forms and their hinges and their clasps and their industrial-looking ports-and nor am I even seeking one. No, even I don’t want a modern Newton with an iPhone’s guts.
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That’s not to say that the idea won’t ever pass out of currency and usefulness, but just that now, in my mid-thirties, having been exposed for such a long time to the idea of docking-usually necessary because technology hadn’t advanced to a point where a portable computer could be powerful and flexible enough in itself-it will always make a kind of instinctual sense to me. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being tickled by the idea of slotting a portable computer into some kind of desktop dock and having its capabilities expanded, even simply, as here.
