The Newtonians: Worldwide Cult Ditches iPhone for Apple's Distant Past

If you're hiking the Lake Tahoe Rim Trail and you run into a man carrying a camouflage Apple Newton, it's probably Ron Parker.

Parker always carries his Newton when he walks the mountains circling Tahoe. It's wrapped in a U.S. Army case he bought on eBay, and it's armed with a GPS antenna -- something the Newton wasn't exactly meant to use. You see, Apple quit selling its seminal handheld PC more than 15 years ago, well before GPS location systems became standard issue with mobile devices.

But Parker found a way to jury-rig the thing with a two-way radio, and thanks to that GPS antenna -- not to mention a Mac modem cable and a USB power adapter, some new software and several other arcane contraptions -- his Newton now serves as an interactive digital map and hiking journal that tracks his progress across every mountain, hill, and trail.

"I call it," he says, "The Lake Tahoe Hiking Newton."

It's just one of his many Newtons. He collects them and hacks them and shares them. And he's not alone. He's at the heart of a thriving, if dwindling, worldwide community of people who still use the hardback-sized device -- often in ways you wouldn't expect. You'll find most of them on the NewtonTalk mailing list, which boasts about 1,100 members. Some just enjoy chatting about the Newton or tinkering with it on occasion. But others still use the thing as a personal digital assistant, and a few, like Parker, go further.

"It's funny to me, because I haven't used the thing in so many years," says Steve Capps, the software programmer and engineer who helped design the Newton as well as the original Apple Macintosh. "But there's this hacker community out there that has kept it [going]. There's a card to get internet access, and somebody wrote a browser -- something Apple never did."

After its debut in early August 1993 -- twenty years ago -- the Newton was widely derided as a flawed machine that no one wanted. The Simpsons made fun of its handwriting-recognition software, as did Gary Trudeau with a Doonesbury gag. In Trudeau's cartoon world, the Newton recognized "Catching on?" as "Egg Freckles?" -- and the die was cast.

It was easy to make fun of. "We kinda teed it up for him," Capps says, referring to the, shall we say, limitations of the first Newtons. But the device still found a passionate audience, one that truly loved it then and loves it now, even as modern smartphones and tablets have come along to make it look even more limited than it did 20 years ago.

Grant Hutchinson, who oversees the NewtonTalk mailing list from his home in Calgary, Canada, owns more than 80 Newtons, and one of them runs as a web server. In Kuwait, Wahyu Ichwandardi and his children use the Newton as a sketching device, a way of creating digital art. And in France, coder Paul Guyot has built an emulator that lets you run Newton software on your desktop PC -- or even your iPhone.

Every so often, people like Hutchinson and Guyot come together for what they call the Worldwide Newton Conference. 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. "The Worldwide Newton Conference is about 25 people, as it turns out," he says. "But they really were worldwide. Every hemisphere was represented."

At first, this seems inexplicable. "It was kinda weird," Smith says. "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. If you repair a new device, Smith says, it's a vocation. If you repair a Newton, it's art.

"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. That's what moves it from commerce [or] vocation to art."

A Personal MIT Media Lab

Grant Hutchinson was there for the birth of the Newton. 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. He didn't buy a Newton -- "not everyone can drop $1,000 on a new toy," he says -- but his boss did. And by that night, Hutchinson had it in his hands.

"We would work the floor at the show during the day, and in the evenings, he let me play with it. I was just enamored by the way it did things. It was so different from anything else I had ever used," Hutchinson remembers. "The screen was huge. You could use a stylus to input data. It recognized your handwriting -- kinda. There was something fundamentally fascinating about the whole thing."

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. Through the late '90s, he carried it with him everywhere. "It was my everyday note-taking, address book, and calendaring device," he says. "I used it for years before I ever owned a laptop."

For people like Hutchinson, the Newton was -- and still is -- a remarkable feat of engineering. 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. "It was super clean. Sharp pixels. Black on white. Very much like early Macintosh software," he says. "There was a inherent visual attraction to it."

He loved that it could recognize not only handwriting, but shapes. "You could draw a rough box, and it would snap into a perfect square. You could draw a rough circle and it would snap into a perfect geometric example of a circle," he says. "There was nothing else you could compare it to, unless you were living in the MIT Media Lab."

Yes, the handwriting recognition was flawed. But it worked up to a point -- even with words written in cursive. "I thought it was kind of amazing that it was able to do anything like that at all," Hutchinson says. And by the time the device was discontinued in 1998, many people say, it was remarkably adept at reading your scribble.

In the '90s, Andrei Chichak, of Edmonton, Canada, worked at a university hospital that used the Newton for administrative tasks. Though the handwriting recognition was laughable with the first handhelds that arrived at the hospital, he says, a later version of the device, the MessagePad 2100, was quite different. "[It] understood medical Latin written by someone who never learned to write with any style," he says. "Apple had now mastered writing recognition in a big way."

Steve Jobs and Apple shut down production anyway. According to Steve Capps, Jobs and company just didn't see a way to make money from the thing. But thanks to people like Hutchinson, the Newton not only lives on, it continues to evolve.

In addition to his Newton emulator, Paul Guyot has written countless software device drivers that operate countless pieces of hardware the Newton was never designed to operate. And when the Newton was plagued by its version of the Y2K bug -- fittingly for this misfit device, it happened in 2010, not Y2K -- a man named Eckhart Köppen wrote a system patch that fixed it.¹ "Most people who worked at Apple on the Newton team didn't know how to make a system patch -- and he did it without any source code," says Walter Smith, referring to the software code that underpins the Newton operating system.

For Ron Parker -- the man with The Lake Tahoe Hiking Newton -- hacks like this are worthwhile simply because they're difficult. The Newton is a puzzle that needs solving. "I guess it's a geek thing," he says. "I do things other people would have trouble doing."

But while Parker, Guyot, and others hack the Newton for their own enjoyment, they also share their creations -- and their knowledge -- with others. Guyot has also spoken at The Worldwide Newton Conference, and through the NewtonTalk mailing list, Parker helps people solve their own puzzles, providing advice on repairing, augmenting, and, yes, jury-rigging the Newton. "People get Newtons. They want to fix 'em so they can use 'em, and they want to get wireless on them so they can communicate. They need hand-holding." He'll even ship them memory cards they can slot into their Newtons and instantly grab all the software and drivers they need.

Yes, people still use the thing as a PDA. Lloyd Conway bought his first Newton in 2008 -- 10 years after the line was discontinued -- and he treats the NewtonTalk mailing list as a support line. "My wife asked me to get a PDA because I had so much stuff going on. I started looking at different options, and I settled on the Newton," he says. "One of the reason I chose it is that I knew I could get support."

The Newton Museum

According to Steve Capps, Apple sold about half a million Newtons, and at least a few hundred are still out there -- on desks next to PCs, plugged into network routers, strapped onto bicycles, advertised on eBay. But if eBay is any indication, their numbers are dwindling, probably because their hardware is wearing out. Lloyd Conway says that prices are going up, a clear indication that supply is shrinking.

Outside of Grant Hutchinson's massive Newton collection, the most notable stash belongs to former Apple man Walter Smith. A few years ago, he bought "The Newton Museum" from another collector, and today, he proudly displays it on the web. It spans not just the handhelds themselves, but also accessories, software, manuals, and boxes.

Yes, newer devices have eclipsed the Newton in so many technical ways. But they can't give you nostalgia. "An Android sent this," reads the signature on an email from Ron Parker. "Don't tell my Newton."

In 2007, when Lewis Miller turned up at a software developer meetup centered around the brand new iPhone, he brought his Newton. Miller calls himself "Dr. Izaac," a sly nod to the old Apple handheld, and you'll find the moniker in his email handle. Today, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, he helps run an organization called the Stanford Newton Users Group.

Certainly, groups like this are on the wane too -- as is the NewtonTalk mailing list. But they aren't going away any time soon.

After all these years, Grant Hutchinson's Newton collection is still growing. About a month ago, he had lunch with his old boss from Image Club Graphics -- the guy who laid down $1,000 for the original Newton in 1993. "I have a surprise for you," his old boss said after they sat down. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out that original Newton, and gave it to Hutchinson.

"So, now I have that same Newton," Hutchinson says. "It's sitting on a pile of first volume Byte magazines on my desk."

¹Correction 1:08am EST 08/06/13: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Paul Guyot as the man who wrote the Newton Y2010K system patch.