As many of you may or may not know, the inner circle of the Boston PDA User group is a group of hardcore former Newton users.
Indeed this should be the case, as this group started way back in 1992 at the dawn of the PDA era with a visit from Apple showing us (under NDA) the pre-release version of the first Messagepad.
My first meeting at Bospdaug was in December 1996, when I discovered a notice online that Apple would be presenting the Newton 2000 and eMate and I was hooked on both Bospdaug and Newton.
Since the Newton met its untimely demise in early 1998, at pretty much every meeting since, someone at some point pines wistfully for the return of the Newton. Two weeks ago, we were mulling over this very subject when one of us (it might have been me) wondered out loud “I wonder what is going on with that Newton emulator project that started a few years ago?”
Probably blinded by our angst over the loss of Newton, somehow we’ve missed this.
The Newton-Einstein emulator works, and it just may free the Newton to run on new hardware.
The ‘Einstein Project’ started out an emulator started in 2004 by Paul Guyot and Nicolas Zinovieff that mimics the ARM hardware that the Newton originally ran under in the 90’s. It was shown at the 2004 ‘Worldwide Newton Conference’ in Paris in ‘04, and it ran on OSX.
It was updated in a big way for the 2nd WWNC in January of this year in San Francisco. It became the ‘Einstein Platform’, which includes a layer called ‘Relativity’ which will allow Newton apps to use host technologies in the underlying OS Eintein launches from.
It was shown running on a Sharp Zaurus. (!)
It will run on pretty much any embedded system with X11 and enough memory.
A major update ‘2006.6′ was released at the end of May this year that runs more smoothly than earlier versions. It requires a complete Newton ROM image, which one gets from their Newton with some supplied techniques and tools.
Caveats are that it is still slow, has some bugs, does not implement communications (yet), but it basically runs. One can drag and drop existing Newton packages onto ‘Einstein’ and about 90% of the time, they just run.
As this progresses, the possibilities could be endless.
I will have this with me at the September 26th bospdaug meeting, and we’ll take it for a spin.
The homepage for the Newton-Einstein project can be found here.
