Apple: Newton
Apple’s sales growth rate had slumped after 1989 since there were no other products to fill in the large shoes that McIntosh had left behind. Apple’s sales grew by more than 2 billion dollars between 1987 and 1989. A year later, sales only grew by 10 million dollars. With Apple’s founders being very ambitious, the minor growth was a disappointment.
What Apple needed was something extraordinary; something out of the box. That is when the idea of a handheld device struck the mind. Apple decided to put together one of the first ever PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant). And that was to be named Apple Newton!
In the year 1993, Newton hit the markets with a huge sack of expectations to fill up. Newton, being a digital assistant, was designed to gather, manage and share information. What grew the excitement was its touch screen with a handwriting recognition feature. Although Apple wasn’t the first company to offer this feature, it certainly was one of the best at making it work perfectly.
With an ARM 610 processor equipped with 20 MHz of power, and 640 KB of RAM, Newton is able to run an array of applications including ‘Names’, ‘Dates’, ‘Time-zones Maps’, conversion tools and many others. The Newton also supports flash cards of up to 4 Mb to allow users to make use of third party applications.
Newton had a port that could be used for connecting to a printer. With applications such as ‘Notes’, users could type out a long piece of writing on their hand held device and easily print it out using an ink jet printer.
Collection hobbyists today are certainly keeping their eyes wide open for an opportunity that could help them add the Apple Newton to their home museums. It is this device that led to the development of the much loved IPhone. Hence Newton is considered the grandfather of it. Many people today still use the grandfather. Why? Because it works well!
Related posts:
- About Computer Antique
- Apple: MacIntosh
