Newton (platform) - Development

Development

The Newton project was a PDA platform. The PDA category did not exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the phrase "personal digital assistant" was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's CEO John Sculley, the driving force behind the project. Larry Tesler identified that a powerful, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. He found Hermann Hauser, with the Acorn RISC Machine processor, and put together Advanced RISC Machines. Newton was intended to be a complete reinvention of personal computing. For most of its design lifecycle Newton had a large-format screen, more internal memory, and an object-oriented graphics kernel. One of the original motivating use cases for the design was known as the "Architect Scenario", in which Newton's designers imagined a residential architect working quickly with a client to sketch, clean up, and interactively modify a simple two-dimensional home plan.

There is, however, an extensive history of pen computing that predates the Newton, though not generally in the form of what would now be called a PDA.

For a portion of the Newton's development cycle (roughly the middle third), the project's intended programming language was Dylan though in fact the language and environment never matured enough for any applications to be successfully written. Dylan was a small, efficient object-oriented Lisp variant that still retains some interest. Although it was efficient (for its day, and considering its substantial run-time dynamism), Dylan never lived up to its developers' performance expectations and was a tough sell for a development team unaccustomed to Lisp programming. When the move was made to a smaller form factor (designed by Jonathan Ive), Dylan was relegated to experimental status in the "Bauhaus Project" and eventually canceled outright. Its replacement, NewtonScript, had garbage collection and tight integration with the "soup" storage and user-interface toolkit, and was specifically designed to run in small RAM/large ROM environments. It was mostly developed by Walter Smith from 1992 to 1993.

The project missed its original goals to reinvent personal computing, and then to rewrite contemporary application programming. The Newton project fell victim to project slippage, scope creep, and a growing fear that it would interfere with Macintosh sales. It was reinvented as a PDA platform which would be a complementary Macintosh peripheral instead of a stand-alone computer which might compete with the Macintosh.

Although PDAs had been developing since the original Psion Organiser in 1984, the Newton has left one particular lasting impression: the term personal digital assistant was first coined to refer to the Newton.

John Sculley says Apple invested approximately US$100M to develop Newton.