Newton Technology After Cancellation
Before the Newton project was canceled, it was "spun off" into an Apple wholly owned subsidiary company, Newton Inc., but was reabsorbed several months later when Apple CEO Gil Amelio was fired by the board and Steve Jobs took over as then interim CEO. Two ex-Apple Newton developers founded Pixo, the company that created the operating system for the original iPod.
Speculation continued for several years that Apple might release a new PDA with some Newton technology or collaborate with Palm. Feeding a bit of speculation, Apple put the "Print Recognizer" part of the Newton 2.1 handwriting recognition system into Mac OS X version 10.2 (known as "Jaguar"). It can be used with graphics tablets to seamlessly input handwritten printed text anywhere there was an insertion point on the screen. This technology, known as "Inkwell", appears in the System Preferences whenever a tablet input device is plugged in. An Easter egg in Print Recognizer on the Newton (write "ROSETTA! ROSETTA! ROSETTA!", and the Newton will insert "ROSETTA! ROSETTA! Hey, that's me!" instead) was present in Inkwell in Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3, but seems to have been removed in 10.4. Larry Yaeger was the author of the original Rosetta recognizer on the Newton, and was also responsible for porting it to Mac OS X. The Rosetta name was later used for Apple's PowerPC software translation layer for Intel-based Macs.
Some of the handwriting recognition technology from the Newton later found its way into Windows CE. The letter preferences menus showing the different ways that people write cursive characters were pixel identical on Windows CE to those previously used on the MessagePad.
At an All Things Digital conference in 2004, Steve Jobs made reference to a new "Apple PDA" (perhaps a successor to the Newton) which the company had developed but had decided not to bring to market. The tablet eventually evolved into the iOS product family.
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