The original Apple Newton MessagePad. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED The Newton promised a simple, portable, use-everywhere experience. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED A look into the potential future of the Newton. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED Newton's marketing materials promised a device that could take notes as well as any pad of paper--and in fact even better. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED A Newton prototype--the challenges of creating a pocket-sized device were immense. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED Newton prototype detail. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED Despite its failure to catch on, Newton created a splash in computing circles. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED Although paltry now, 2MB of expandable memory was plenty in 1993. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

In product lore, high profile gadgets that get killed are often more interesting than the ones that succeed. The Kin, the HP TouchPad, and the Edsel are all case studies in failure–albeit for different reasons. Yet in the history of those killings, nothing compared to the Apple Newton MessagePad. The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men. And yet it was a remarkable device, one whose influence is still with us today. The Ur tablet. The first computer designed to free us utterly from the desktop.

Birth of an Idea

Newton was conceived on an airplane. That’s where Michael Tchao pitched the idea to Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, in early 1991. The company would announce it the following year, and the first product in the Newton Line, the MessagePad 100 1 went on sale twenty years ago this week in August of 1993. It was Apple’s handheld PDA–a term Apple coined to describe it. By modern standards, it was pretty basic. It could take notes, store contacts, and manage calendars. You could use it to send a fax. It had a stylus, and could even translate handwriting into text. Well, sort of. At the time, this was highly ambitious. Handheld computers were still largely the stuff of science fiction.

Handheld computers were still largely the stuff of science fiction.

“The goals were to design a new category of handheld device and to build a platform to support it,” explains Steve Capps, the Newton’s head of user interface and software development who both helped dream it up and make it real. “The restrictions imposed by battery life necessitated a new architecture.” That is, with Newton, Apple didn’t just set out to create a new device. It wanted to invent an entirely new class of computing. Computers that could slip into pockets and go out into the world. In fact, the pocket was a core design requirement.

When Michael Tchao first pitched the Newton to Sculley, there were a few requirements. It would have a pen, a radio that worked on a pager frequency, forms and templates built in but that could be designed on a Mac or PC, and it would have to act as a “seamless” input device for a PC. But Sculley quickly added one more core feature: size. “The number one requirement was that it had to fit in John Sculley’s pocket,” explains Gavin Ivester, who ran the Newton’s industrial design. “We focused on width because that affects how you hold it. You need to be able to reach around with your fingertips on one side and the fleshy part of your thumb on the other to feel like you’re not going to drop it. You really only feel secure if you can turn it over in your hand and still hold it.”

At the time, it was extremely difficult to get component manufacturers to build any sort of custom parts. That meant everything on the PC board had to be at right angles–which made fit a challenge. The team was trying to pull off a design referred to as “the Batman concept” a dark, sleek and sculpted aesthetic. It was also Apple’s first real departure from the Snow White design language, created by Frog Design, which had defined the company’s products in the 1980s. Apple, after firing Frog Design for working with NeXT, was redefining what their products could look like. But fitting all the parts into a sleek black pocketable wrapper proved difficult.

“We joked about sneaking into Sculley’s house and sewing bigger pockets into everything,” recalls Ivester. But they made it work. They crammed together a palmable, portable computer. And in 1992, they unveiled to the world in front of a packed house at CES.

A Sudden Death

The result of all that work was a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language. There was just one problem: handwriting. “We were just way ahead of the technology,” laments Capps. “We barely got it functioning by ’93 when we started shipping it.” Handwriting recognition was supposed to be Newton’s killer feature, and yet it was the feature that probably ultimately killed the product. Newton’s character recognition problems became the butt of jokes, most famously in Doonesbury.

Garry Trudeau devoted an entire week of the strip to making fun the handwriting recognition in Apple’s new device. As it turned out, the Newton was a tangental target. Trudeau would later tell the Apple team that he had not even tried it when he wrote the series. But he wanted to lampoon boys with their toys, and the Newton’s handwriting recognition–which was already receiving bad press–seemed an easy target, as did the idea of replacing a perfectly good $5 notebook with a $700 computer.

Nonetheless, it was devastating. A panel in which Michael Doonesbury writes “Catching on?” that the Newton translated as “egg freckles” became the shorthand joke for the device. (Steve Capps would later license a new Doonesbury cartoon and build “egg freckles” into the MessagePad 200 Newton software 2.0 as an Easter Egg.2) It was a blow to the team, who had put their lives into the Newton. They went back to work, and eventually got it right. But it was too late. “Character recognition got revisited and was just flawless and phenomenal,” laments Ivester. “The one stumbling block had become a joy to use, but it really never got a second look.”

But as bad as Doonesbury was for its image, Newton had an enemy much bigger than Garry Trudeau. Steve Jobs hated it. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, he raged against the device for its poor performance (and because it was Sculley’s innovation) and mocked its novel input mechanism.

“God gave us ten styluses,” he would say, waving his fingers. “Let’s not invent another.”

And so when Jobs’ at last wrested back control of his company, he scuttled it. As he explained to Isaacson:

If Apple had been in a less precarious situation, I would have drilled down myself to figure out how to make it work. I didn’t trust the people running it. My gut was that there was some really good technology, but it was fucked up by mismanagement. By shutting it down, I freed up some good engineers who could work on new mobile devices. And eventually we got it right when we moved on to iPhones and the iPad.

“Apple at that point had way too many projects,” says Capps. “I think he looked at Newton and said, ‘I couldn’t do anything with it.'”

The Lasting Legacy

Despite its relatively short life, the Newton and the thinking that went into it still resonates today. Hobbyists still use them. There’s a museum dedicated to it. And more to the point, it still exists in the devices you use today.

Handwriting recognition was supposed to be Newton’s killer feature.

There’s also at least one tangible thread that connects the Newton to something you likely use every day (and that indeed drives the entire mobile industry): the ARM processor. Looking to maximize battery life, the Newton team went gunning for something that could generate lots of bits MIPS per watt of power.3 The best bet for that looked to be an ARM chip. Apple owned a third of the company at the time and directed development of the ARM6 processor that went into the Newton. Without the Newton, that technology could have died on the vine.

But the real impact of the Newton was the thinking that took the computer out of the office. Today, the PDA is with us all the time. We don’t use a stylus, though, we use a keyboard (which, for most of us, is likely a much faster and more efficient way to input text.) It’s our smartphone, and the whole concept of the smartphone was that it would bundle the PDA, the camera, the MP3 player, and the cell phone. And then there’s Siri and Google Voice search. The idea of an intelligent assistant that can recognize natural language and act on its intent is powerful once again, but this was something Newton pioneered–one of its great strengths was its ability to take a sentence like “I have a lunch meeting with John tomorrow at noon” and translate that into an actual calendar item. The Newton project was a failure, sure. But its impact lives on, in our day-to-day lives.

1. Correction 10:40 EST 08/05/2013 The first Newton model was the MessagePad

2. Correction 14:45 EST 08/06/2013 The Easter egg features a new Doonesbury cartoon concealed in the Newton’s second operating system.

3. Correction 14:45 EST 08/06/2013 The proper measurement is millions of instructions per second.