Einstein Would Be Magnificent

[daffy]

There is a project called Einstein that has produced a Newton emulator. OP would finally be a touchscreen device that could be a great Newton platform, having the battery life and speed that the platform always needed.

The project appears to have not been updated for a year, but it runs on N800 so could probably be made to work on OP. The amazing new platform might lure previous developers on the project to continue updating it. But I believe that if the current code could be ported to OP, it would run pretty well without other updates.

If you have never used a Newton -- the latest ones, running the 2nd generation OS -- you're missing out. HWR that worked great, and a super slick OS (think "magic paper") unlike anything else.

I'm not enough of a Linux hacker to attempt it, but if anyone could port Einstein to OP, well, you just might start something special.

 

[kingoddball]

The Newton is that old ass apple thing? Clear green case laptop style?
I remember using one of them over 12 years ago!! (if we're talking about the same thing)

It was kick ass!

 

[daffy]

The Newton is that old ass apple thing? Clear green case laptop style?
I remember using one of them over 12 years ago!! (if we're talking about the same thing)

It was kick ass!

Yes, we are talking about the same thing.

Video

 

[darien]

 

[hobbyman II]

ah! the joys of handwriting/speech recognition :lol:

as Yoda would say, more pointless applications yet to see I have

even as a fairly slow typist I can beat any speech or handwriting application in my sleep, even using a tiny on-screen keyboard.

 

[paulguy]

Hey that thing is kinda neat. But instead of an emulator, I think it would be nicer to just make a system like that from scratch, or even have good handwriting recognition in there from the start, and have a handful of applications that're integrated with it, like a not taking program and stuff... though not terribly useful since you can't really lay it flat on a table like a notebook. The screen part will always be floating a bit over the surface. Something to consider if there're some linux applications for it already, but not something to put a ton of effort in to if not.

 

[torpor]

A Newton emu on Pandora would indeed, seriously kick ass. Especially if we can trick NewtonOS into behaving itself at higher speeds ..

A PalmOS emu, as well, would be mighty useful. I believe PalmOS really had a vibrant and interesting collection of 3rd-party apps, so I imagine being able to switch between PandoraOS, NewtonOS and PalmOS would provide quite a selection of possibilities for the PDA front of things. Sure, the new-school iPhone/smart-phone front is going to plough along regardless, but having a stable environment for the older machines that people, frankly, loved using and still would use if they could, is a good idea.

With that said, I can't wait to do a BCPL, then EDSAC port, and have the very first PDA, ever, in my Pandora box too.

 

[dschroeter]

Wow, I've never seen video of the Newton - clearly if Apple ever brings a new tablet to market it'll incorporate some of those functions.

torpor, quit wasting time on the forums and get back to porting all known audio applications to the Pandora! Posthaste!

 

[DaMummy]

why dont we port an etch-a-sketch to the pandora while we're at it

 

[kingoddball]

Thats awesome.

The one I had mentioned looks like this:
(emate300)

Apple has always had style!

 

[Phawx]

I have that exact model in mint condition at work. No one uses it, nor has used it I believe.

 

[greendots]

why dont we port an etch-a-sketch to the pandora while we're at it

Pandora could emulate an etch-a-sketch almost perfectly with its two nubs. Just need an accelerometer!

 

[timofonic]

What about this Open Source handwriting recognition system for Linux?

http://risujin.org/cellwriter/
http://code.google.com/p/cellwriter/

Those apps seems interesting (they lack hwr integration it seems): http://live.gnome.org/Gnote http://xournal.sourceforge.net

 

[kloplop321]

My Dell Axim x30 does hand writing failures too. I wouldn't depend on it too much.

 

[sterling976]

I tried using cellwriter on an HP TX1320US notebook I converted to Ubuntu a couple years back. I never could get it trained well enough to be useful, and IIRC it was inconvenient to bring up and hide. I hate to say it, but the handwriting recognition that came installed in Vista was better.

That said, it may have just needed a little polish to be usable, and I haven't touched it in over 2 years. I'd be interested to see if anyone's had more recent experience with it.

 

[Exophase]

Emulation really must be 90% nostalgia trip. I think the people who never used this will by and large prefer native software that can accomplish the same tasks.

Unless there were Newton games or something.

daffy, when you mention touchscreen devices struggling to emulate Newton, what kind of model are we looking at? The original 20MHz ARM610 ones? It'd be fun to throw a dynarec at that. I bet then an emulator could handle it on GP2X F200 or Wiz. Or does Einstein have some kind of high level emulation + native code execution WINE style? I'm starting to remember something like this for it.

 

[daffy]

Emulation really must be 90% nostalgia trip. I think the people who never used this will by and large prefer native software that can accomplish the same tasks.

Unless there were Newton games or something.

Newton was a lot more than just hwr. It was a whole integrated package with a unique UI ("magic paper").

daffy, when you mention touchscreen devices struggling to emulate Newton, what kind of model are we looking at? The original 20MHz ARM610 ones? It'd be fun to throw a dynarec at that. I bet then an emulator could handle it on GP2X F200 or Wiz. Or does Einstein have some kind of high level emulation + native code execution WINE style? I'm starting to remember something like this for it.

The Newton devices were great, but the hardware was not quite fast enough to really live up to the idea.

Since the Newton, Einstein has run on various platforms, but none of them were quite right: a desktop pretty much defeats the purpose, and the N800's battery life was only a few hours.

So the OP is really the first device that could actually make a proper Newton emulator.

And yes, someone could write a similar functionality from scratch. But to my knowledge, no-one is. Everyone seems to have given up on the pen UI.

 

[Chip]

Everyone seems to have given up on the pen UI.

There's a reason for that. It's just not efficient, either on the human end or the machine end. Even really good handwriting recognition (which the Newton didn't have) has a much higher error rate and slower speed than thumb-typing.

 

[ashdjones]

Emulation really must be 90% nostalgia trip. I think the people who never used this will by and large prefer native software that can accomplish the same tasks.

Unless there were Newton games or something.

daffy, when you mention touchscreen devices struggling to emulate Newton, what kind of model are we looking at? The original 20MHz ARM610 ones? It'd be fun to throw a dynarec at that. I bet then an emulator could handle it on GP2X F200 or Wiz. Or does Einstein have some kind of high level emulation + native code execution WINE style? I'm starting to remember something like this for it.

Nah. The later Newtons with the updated firmware, including handwriting recognition which actually worked, run at 162 MHz. To use Einstien you need to dump the BIOS from an actual Newton - the author said that any hint of piracy would make him stop development.

 

[Exophase]

Emulation really must be 90% nostalgia trip. I think the people who never used this will by and large prefer native software that can accomplish the same tasks.

Oh, I believe you. And far be it from me to tell you that the software isn't useful, much less that your interest in it isn't genuine. I just think that it's more likely than not one of those things that's looked at more fondly by those who more deeply experienced it the first time around.

The Newton devices were great, but the hardware was not quite fast enough to really live up to the idea.

Since the Newton, Einstein has run on various platforms, but none of them were quite right: a desktop pretty much defeats the purpose, and the N800's battery life was only a few hours.

So the OP is really the first device that could actually make a proper Newton emulator.

And yes, someone could write a similar functionality from scratch. But to my knowledge, no-one is. Everyone seems to have given up on the pen UI.

Alright, so if I understand correctly, what you're saying is that you want something that's substantially faster than all Newtons (including the > 100MHz StrongARM ones, I take it) with very low power draw when you're not using it. I think a real emulator is not a good avenue to these goals and you would be more interested in new software or compatibility layers to allow Newton software to run but without the same execution profile and environment that a full-on emulator would impose.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about Newton to know how feasible high level WINE-style emulation is, but my guess is that since the software itself ran on a wide variety of devices that there won't be a lot of low level hardware requirements outside of an ARM CPU, and that the OS handles the rest through syscalls. Do you know if there's any documentation out there on the OS? An SDK would go a long way too, was it an open development platform at all?