For an ever decreasing number of us, today is an important day: ten years ago Apple discontinued the Newton.

Deprecated

Officially, this was done, “to focus all of [their] software development resources on extending the Macintosh operating system.” Many Newton users feel this was part of Steve Jobs’ personal vendetta against John Sculley for firing him from Apple (after all, the Newton was Sculley’s baby).

However, few can claim that Jobs’ return to Apple and focus on the Mac & Mac OS (plus a few new developments) has done anything but good for the company and its product line. In fact,
Apple’s latest developments such as the iPhone & iPod touch have brought us significantly closer to a modern Newton-like¹ device.

State of the Newton

Five years ago Slashdot posted Five Years Later, Newton Still Going Strong, noting some of the projects keeping the Newton going strong, so let’s look at where the Newton is right now.

First, last year’s WWNC 2007 brought us quite a few new developments, including: open-sourcing of Einstein (the Newton OS 2.1 emulator), the release of DyneTK (open source Newton development tools), and the open-sourcing of Hiroshi Noguchi’s WaveLAN drivers. We also have Simon Bell’s NCX (Newton Connection for Mac OS X), Eckhart Köppen’s Blunt Bluetooth drivers (and work continues on Blunt 2) and various GTD tools.

It’s not all about software though. Frank Gründel of PDA Soft, who has provided much hardware troubleshooting and repair documentation, solved another increasingly common MessagePad 2×00 hardware failure issue back in April of 2006. Indiana Jones, Raiders of the lost Newton defect is his entertaining post to NewtonTalk describing his trials and tribulations.

While UNNA is currently in hibernation, it’s still alive. The NewtonTalk community is still quite active with new users occasionally joining after finding their beloved Newton in a drawer and discovering that it’s still functional preserved all their data.

The Clock Is Ticking

While we’re still going strong at the moment, we all know that we’re a dying breed.

We’ve seen one of our most talented developers, Paul Guyot, step down from his Newton developments due to new employment and, well, he’s probably ready to move on by now.

We’ve also got this nagging feeling that 2010 may pose a problem for our Newtons. Avi Drissman provided a fix, Fix2010, back in 1998, but it’s still only had limited testing.

Facing Future

All in all, I’d say we’re not doing too badly for users a ten year old piece of hardware (and that’s only those of us that are using MessagePad 2100s, many people still use eMates, 2000s, and earlier models). So here’s looking forward to the next ten years!

[ Reminder via stevenf ]

Update: Some additions to this list, including a new announcement regarding the BT-001, can be found in my followup: State of the Newton Addendum.

¹ I say “Newton-like” because the handwriting recognition is such an important part of the Newton experience. Some of the base functionality is similar and the gesture functionality goes a long way, but the HWR is a big piece of the Newton puzzle.