The Newton Has Infinite Lives

The WorldWide Newton Conference wrapped up a few days ago and one piece of surprising news came from it. Paul Guyot trotted out a highly cool chunk of the future called Project Einstein.

The Newton platform still rules the roost, but the hardware, while seriously ahead of its time, is becoming too difficult to maintain. Apple no longer supports it and there are literally only one or two people in the entire world who have enough repair knowledge to keep the things going.

Paul is leading the charge to create the first Newton emulator that runs on a Linux/Unix platform. This way, the Newton OS, which is highly object oriented code in C++ can live on using newer hardware. It seems that the Newton 2.1 OS was built to be distributed with third party products, therefore, it is more willing to work with other hardware and add-ons.

I’ve been pretty bad about using my Newt lately. Not because I don’t like it, but because it got to be too much of a hassle carrying the thing around with my laptop bag. If Paul and his team can pull this off, I’d definitely put the OS on a smaller form factor. Go PAUL!

Here are some screenshots of his Newton OS emulator running under OS X:

Einstein 1

Einstein 2

Einstein 3