Friday, July 30, 1993. Ring any bells? Not for me either. At least not until tonight.
This evening I was going through some old video tapes, deciding which ones I should digitize, which ones I should throw away. And I came across a tape recorded on this date. It was a recording of Good Morning America.
I’d recorded the show because Nancy Travis–a fellow high school classmate–was being interviewed for her new movie “So I Married an Axe Murderer.” It’s so great to see a person blossom into a movie star. But that’s not exactly what was catching my attention this time around.
Preceding her interview was an interview with John Sculley. From Apple. He was showcasing the ultra new…you guessed it…Newton. The Newton was to hit stores starting the following Monday.
What an interesting time capsule I’d uncovered burried at the bottom of my “odds and ends” drawer.
I’ve watched the interview now a handful of times. Simply fascinating to see how far and not so far we’ve come in the twelve years since this show was recorded.
Here’s what was shown. As John Sculley talked through the interview, product manager Michael Chow took Newton through a set of demos. First, he wrote out “hello Good Morning America.” He used a mixture of cursive and print. The recognition went flawlessly. Realize Newton was a pretty small device so you can’t do more than write one word on a row at a time. However, the recognition itself has earned a good reputation–especially for its time.
The big demo within the demo was sending a fax. Yep, a fax. Today, we might use email or an inked IM in a demo, but in 1993 this would have gone over everyones’ heads. Faxes and pages were the all critical business concerns of the time. My how things have changed.
After writing out the above phrase Michael then drew a square and an arrow. Both were recognized perfectly. He also showed selecting one of the graphics objects, moving it around, and later scratching out the objects one at a time. The selection and scratchout gestures didn’t work perfectly, but it looked pretty good.
During the presentation Sculley predicted, “This is going to change the way you get information when you travel around.” He figured with Newton’s ability to fax and receive pages, what a terrific way to stay connected. If the Newton were being launched today, you’d expect a similar mobility story, except the tech terms would include WiFi and EVDO.
Sculley continued, “It’s all about communications. And it’s the next big idea in Information Technology. Just like cellular phones have changed our lives, we think Newton will too.”
Interesting. Same things can be said today about the Tablet PC, although I’d say information sharing is a bigger piece of the communication puzzle. It’s not simply sending and receiving documents and notes. It’s about rich interactions with people next to you or far away. But these are technologies that are coming to the mainstream now. This was 1993.
So how much did Newton weigh? Less than a pound. And what was it’s initial price? $700. Fully loaded less than a $1000. Yes, these are more PDA prices than Tablet prices, but it’s interesting to see where the price point was.
I’ve decided to save this tape. It’s interesting to see how things have progressed over the last twelve years and I look forward to comparing it to what the next twelve bring.
Wow that’s pretty funny. Newton’s recognition was HORRIBLE and it set back handwriting recognition technology for a decade in the minds of the masses. In fact, I think some comic strips used to poke fun at it. The type of stuff the Newton would come up with is hilarious.
Now, what’s better than a Newton from 1993? The Tandy Zoomer (aka Casio Z7000) which was the DOS-based competitor to the Newton. I still have one. I’m looking right at it. I’ll have to pop some batteries in it and take some pictures for you. It was better than the Newton in every way. It ran using GEOS which was a DOS shell (much like Windows 3.1 was) that was fully graphical and fully pen-enabled. The software was developed by Palm (yes, Palm) and it had all sorts of great applications such as fax, notes (store as ink or recognize later — reco sucked on this too), calendar, tasks, contacts, reference library, language translater, world clock, a very nice unit conversion tool, and an AOL client among many others. In fact, they even sold cellular modems for it but they were far out of my price range at 14 years old.
Thanks for making me think of the Zoomer. Ask Chris de Herrera about it. He wrote the FAQ on it and still has a Zoomer tribute page but I can’t remember the URL.
The Tablet PC’s recognizer is the best I’ve used. It’s not perfect, but neither am I perfect at reading my own messy scrawl.
The Tandy Zoomer was also one of the early PDAs. Another Tandy device that I admired quite a bit was the T100. (http://www.sonic.net/~webtech/Tandy102/) I soooo wanted one of these when they came out. My dream was to make it my main controller for a Robot.
Tablet is lightyears ahead of previous handwriting recognition technologies. It’s awesome.