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Friday, October 3, 2003 |
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I guess I missed it when it first came out. I sure am glad something caused me to look back at this pointer from Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Weblog.
So there is method to their madness. Now it all makes sense. |
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Coincidentally enough (see below), John Sculley laments the fate of the Newton (and HyperCard) in this interview on Cnet. I'm surprised that he thinks the Newton handwriting recognition was so awful. I had one (a Model 110, too), and I thought it was serviceable. The best thing about it was that I could take ink notes, if I was really concerned about it. I could recognize later, and usually that wasn't even necessary. Actually, what was best was the overall fluidity and integration of the system. I still don't think there is a PDA today that can really compare. Granted, it was too big, but it could undergo a tremendous shrink using today's technology. Today's Palm hardware is on par or better than the 2100.
Sculley's point regarding the money made off the related investment in ARM is something I hadn't thought about before.
I know it is crazy, but I would love to see the Newton OS on Palm-style hardware and HyperCard updated and running on OS X. I think others would, too. Even many who don't know it right now. |
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Ted Leung got corrected by A. San Juan for misusing the term monoculture, but he uses it to express something quite interesting. Ted points out that so much of computing has homogenized around static, C-like languages and Unix-like operating systems. (NT really isn't that different.) I think that some radical changes are needed to really make computers useful to the average person. I'm not suggesting that the average person cares all that much what language his system is programmed in. However, I think that think like file systems other common OS concepts aren't that helpful to the average user, and I think that the language used to build a system does have impact on the behavior of the system. I can't help thinking of the Newton system as an example of an alternative that merits reconsideration.
Ted also wonders about how valid the assumptions of the past will prove to be when we have "multiple processor cores on a chip, and hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and incredible rendering performance", which reminds me that I read something recently about how storage access techniques will have to be radically reconsidered as densities increase. I think the gist of the issue was that random access would just be too slow and there would have to be efforts to optimize for sequential access. I'll try to dig that up. |
Last update: 11/2/04; 6:12:59 PM .
