Apple Newton
|
|
| Developer | Apple Inc. |
|---|---|
| Type | Bar PDA |
| Release date | 1993 |
| Discontinued | February 27, 1998 |
| Operating system | Newton OS |
| Input | Touch screen |
The Newton is a series of personal digital assistants developed and marketed by Apple Inc. An early device in the PDA category – the Newton originated the term "personal digital assistant" – it was the first to feature handwriting recognition. Apple started developing the platform in 1987 and shipped the first devices in 1993. Production officially ended on February 27, 1998. Newton devices run on a proprietary operating system, Newton OS; examples include Apple's MessagePad series and the eMate 300, and other companies also released devices running on Newton OS. Most Newton devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting-based input.
The Newton was considered technologically innovative at its debut, but its high price and early problems with its handwriting recognition feature limited its sales. Apple cancelled the platform at the direction of Steve Jobs in 1998.
The Newton project was a personal digital assistant platform. The PDA category did not exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the phrase "personal digital assistant" was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's CEO John Sculley, the driving force behind the project. Larry Tesler determined that a powerful, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. He found Hermann Hauser, with the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) processor, and put together Advanced RISC Machines (now ARM Holdings). Newton was intended to be a complete reinvention of personal computing. For most of its design lifecycle Newton had a large-format screen, more internal memory, and an object-oriented graphics kernel. One of the original motivating use cases for the design was known as the "Architect Scenario", in which Newton's designers imagined a residential architect working quickly with a client to sketch, clean up, and interactively modify a simple two-dimensional home plan.
...
Wikipedia