Gregory's ServerThe Apple Newton WatchPad was a roaring success in the early 2000s, and dimensionally only a few short hops over.
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@jamesthomson Oh 'Calculator' on the WatchPad was originally yours - but Apple bought you out for £90million in 1998 when they committed to a huge expanded Newton program in-house. @jamesthomson @NanoRaptor this is the For All Mankind spinoff series we never knew we needed. @davidwengier @jamesthomson @NanoRaptor 👍 Bring in a writer like Ashly Burch and then you might have a project  @davidwengier @jamesthomson @NanoRaptor I love “alternate history”, but Nanoraptor might just as well have crossed over from the Fringe universe , or most likely The Counterpart universe. For now I believe they are documenting the history of the Counterpart reality. @NanoRaptor @jamesthomson There were remarkable rumours about what that £90 million was spent on! @davidh @NanoRaptor @jamesthomson Yeah, wow, that Time Person of the Year article sure was a bit of an eye opener. But as we all know the calculator dice Easter egg was really what drove the success of the iWrist.    @NanoRaptor +1000 pts for having Escape Velocity on it, although it was cumbersome with the wired keyboard.  @NanoRaptor Rather than Kindle, it would have been Mobipocket or some of the really niche applications like my favorite, Tome Raider.     @NanoRaptor Being able to play Marathon on it's original Newton platform was best! ;-)   @NanoRaptor nice Easter egg with the model number, 9:41 is an homage to the iPhone 2Gs announcement time iirc @NanoRaptor If this isn’t in the next season of For All Mankind I will be shocked. They all already use Newtons.   @teajaygrey @NanoRaptor Woz bought the Nixie watch after he saw my friend Ken wearing one. So did I. Ken and I were both volunteers at the Computer History Museum at the time, on the PDP-1 Restoration Project. @brouhaha yeah, tubes can be fragile. I have a DAP with vacuum tubes that I use sparingly because I don't want to deal with it breaking and having to repair or replace it. Alex, the Director at the made.org had a four digit/tube Nixie clock at his house, but I imagine the wrist watch variants are more prone to wear and tear than something stationary. @teajaygrey @NanoRaptor @teajaygrey @NanoRaptor @teajaygrey @NanoRaptor I really like the HP 28/48/49/50 series of RPL calculators very much, but I still am fond of their traditional RPN calculators.   @NanoRaptor Maybe! In our timeline I'm convinced that Palm stomped Newton because Palm was pocket sized and Newton wasn't.  @gparker @NanoRaptor I’ve always thought this was the biggest of all problems with the Newton. Kind of ironic too given Apple’s eventual obsession with miniaturization after the NeXT reunification. Never again. @gruber @gparker @NanoRaptor Although I think Apple Vision Pro definitely has a case of ‘not miniaturized enough’. @jamesdempsey @gparker @NanoRaptor It does. But imagine what a similarly specced device from any other company would look like or weigh. You might need a monopod for support. Like: @jamesdempsey @gruber @gparker @NanoRaptor Or the iPhone. Or the MacBook “Air”. Feels like bigger is better nowadays. @gruber @gparker @NanoRaptor There were a large amount of folks when I worked in the group that wanted to do a smaller one, but for reasons I don’t remember and weren’t a part of they went larger. @NanoRaptor I see the Newton WatchPad had just as stellar battery life as our dimension’s Apple Watch  @nicholas_saunders @NanoRaptor totally not, when NanoRaptor shows one of their creations and I ask for a(n age-appropriate but sized) stylus  Maybe if they'd put a wristband on the Humane AI-pin the product would be salvageable? 🤓🙈🤔🤷♂️⌚️😅 @oliver_schafeld @NanoRaptor Steve Jobs killed the Newton then stole all the ideas to reimplement later. Rather cowardly. #whatif Apple had really doubled-down on it instead? That would've been amazing. BERNY Men's Digital Sports Watch E-Ink Display Fashion LED E-Paper Watch Curved Dial Leather Band Watches with Two-time Zone Waterproof Wristwatches no bluetooth :( @NanoRaptor Doesn’t it need a web browser, like our LunaSuite? https://web.archive.org/web/19991004105015/http://newton.lunatech.com/products/lunasuite/features/web.ltml   @NanoRaptor @futurebird we thought we were so cool back then. Reminds me of my PupilPilot contact lens PDA.  @NanoRaptor the original model with the reflective LCD was a difficult use at night, but they fixed it after only a few models with a transflective backlit LCD, can’t remember the number though. Battery life suffered, but it was worth the upgrade. @NanoRaptor one of the main sources of revenue it created was a market for replacement styluses. The tiny little toothpick-sized one kept getting lost. Using an actual toothpick in a pinch was possible, but pressing too hard would leave little dents in the pressure sensitive plastic layer. Very few dimensions where this existed actually remain. In some of them, Apple was eventually bought up by Casio.  @fnordius @NanoRaptor @NanoRaptor I would actually pay good money for an eink #FOSS wearable device like this. Oh wait, we already killed the #Pebble  @NanoRaptor I have a coffee table book full of Apple design concepts that never became products. Yes, there’s a watch from the 90s. And a bike computer that promised to give riding directions. @NanoRaptor i got to try a real newton back then. It was sloooow, but it’s not like i had any real concept of snappy tablets then   @dfbills @NanoRaptor you think that's bad, you should see the model they made out of solid gold! @Eggfreckles @NanoRaptor The portable Rolodex 📇 was what helped my work on the move though   @NanoRaptor The most probable explanation is that Apple refused customer demands to support Swatch Internet Time [1], which had become the official European time system in 1998, with the notable exception of Switzerland.   |
@NanoRaptor I see I didn't do a version of PCalc for the Newton in any dimension!