Nosce te ipsum

We've all heard of Apple's Newton, the portable handheld device under John Sculley's rule at Apple that debuted to big media attention and much fanfare but never managed to take a strong footing in the marketplace. The same handhel that went on to be 'Steve'd' when Mr. RDF killed the project after taking control of Apple.

That's the extent of knowledge most of us have with regard to Apple's first handheld device. OS Opinion sheds light on the early days of the pocket mac." From the article: "Apple in the late eighties had become stagnant. The Macintosh had become Apple's cash cow like the Apple II that had preceded it. To protect the Mac, Apple was hesitant to start or pursue any project that might compromise the company's revenues. Several people in the corporation were weary of this approach, and began to look at the future of computing. One of those people was Steve Sakoman."

It's a fun article, taking a break from reality to go down memory lane for some of us early adopters all those years ago. At the time, I was 21 years ago and this was probably the single most expensive gadget that I'd ever owned. I owned the very first Newton model ever made and owned it for all of two weeks and not by choice -- I was in the process of buying my very first house and was desperately scraping for the down payment wherever I could so unfortunately I had to return my Newton to the store (which if I recall, was nearly $1,000 with all the accessories). In later years I owned the 2000 and 2100 but always had such fond memories of that early model.

Dori, you continue to make me smile. When I take my car in, I doubt any of them can even spell WiFi let alone conceive of implementing it for their customers.

Random scene from my life

I took my car into the shop for its regular servicing this morning, and I got comfortable in their waiting room while repairs occurred. The service guy sees me on my PowerBook, and said, "Hey, it's too bad that you're not here in two weeks [~] our network guy says we'll have wireless access for everyone who's waiting then!"

I said, "Actually, you should tell your network guy that he should pick harder passwords to guess."

While the above actually happened, that particular network didn't let me onto the net. Which was probably a good thing, as I then got a couple of widgets written (whew!).