Comments for Walology

Comment on Walology by Walter Smith

Walter Smith — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:42:44 +0000

Frederica – You’re probably best off getting a StyleWriter printer on eBay. The eMate has built-in support for them. For more information on eMate printing, here’s a helpful post on another site:

http://www.diyplanner.com/node/3994#comment-37028

Comment on Walology by Frederica

Frederica — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:26:33 +0000

Hello
I have a eMate300
I got it for an elder who is confused with computers and just wants to write letters and print them.
I need some help to find the right printer and connecting cables, can you help me.
thank you
Frederica

Comment on Walology by Les Connally

Les Connally — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:00:31 +0000

Thanks for your ongoing stewardship of the Newton Museum! It is appreciated

Comment on Newton stuff by Walter Smith

Walter Smith — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:43:03 +0000

J&K Sales and Newton Sales have some original Newton parts and accessories.

Comment on Newton stuff by B. Simpson

B. Simpson — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:34:21 +0000

I am looking for an ORIGINAL Apple Newton 2100 leather case. I have tried ebay to no avail. Any suggestions?

Comment on About me by Paul R. Potts

Paul R. Potts — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:34:25 +0000

Hi Walter,

I’m reminiscing today — I was just looking at the Dylan “power to cancel your very best” t-shirts.

It’s likely you don’t remember me, but I was an early Newton adopter and developer, as well as a Mac developer, and wrote some articles for PIE Developer. I was at the Newton launch in Boston, and bought a Newton and NTK there, blowing all the money I had in the world and then some. I was at the first Newton developer conference. Kent Sandvik gave Mike Nowak and I a tour of the Apple facility. My co-worker at the time, Mike Nowak, set up the Newton newsgroups. I wrote the first versions of the Newton FAQ. I went on to develop some prototypes, and eventually got a real job as a Newton developer, briefly with Pharos, as a test engineer for the Infielder Crop Records system, then at the University of Michigan.

I met you at, I think, one of the Newton developer events. Several of the Newton people (Engber, Ebert, others?) were at MacHack in Ann Arbor, oh, maybe that was 1995? I don’t recall if you were there.

I spent several years working on Newton tools for health survey applications, to support research studies. We had a kind of DSL for authoring surveys, implemented inside NewtonScript. Data structures generated at build time in NTK, then ‘frozen’ into the package — it’s commonplace in the Common Lisp world, but most programmers have still never even conceived of tools that could give them that kind of leverage.

NewtonScript was my first attempt to wrap my head around a dynamic language and closures. I remember that you were extremely helpful on the newsgroup and in personal e-mail in getting me out of my Pascal/C/C++ mindset. Your explanation of how closures actually work stays with me today and helped me eventually come to understand Dylan, Scheme, Ruby, Python and even Haskell.

I think we spoke on the phone at one point, but I may be mis-remembering that. I know I bugged the Newton Developer Support engineers a great deal. I was a Newton DTS wannabe — even sent my resume in to Apple, and to Kent Sandvik.

Anyway, I’m glad to see you have a little more presence online. Good luck with the new venture and thanks for the inspiration!

Comment on LinkedIn by Yvonne

Yvonne — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:36:11 +0000

I found since leaving Microsoft I do more networking as well which is weird since I left technology to do pastry of all things.

Even weirder, I sometimes feel like the oldest person on MySpace.

Comment on Newton stuff by walter

walter — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:11:07 +0000

Yep, that looks very familiar…I spent many an hour hunched over one of those things.

Comment on Newton stuff by Steve White

Steve White — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:05:53 +0000

One more post about the dev unit for any curious onlookers. Decided to open it up, and posted a few pictures up on flickr. I couldn’t remove the board with all the switches (and it seems to drive the LCD/etc as well). So a majority of the pictures are of the bank of Hitachi SRAM and some TI NuBus chips. There are two chips with a printed label on them:

DEBUGGER
9e43554?? (can’t read the last bit as it’s under the board)

SLRNTMGR
b2a62191

They can all be seen at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pablo_marx/tags/newton/

Cheers,
Steve

“WallyScript…you’re soaking in it!”

Comment on Newton stuff by walter

walter — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:16:34 +0000

Don’t worry about it… Judging from the size, I think that’s one of the units where the ROM contents were actually in RAM (to rapidly download new ROM builds, set breakpoints, and patch the code). Since you can’t connect it to a Mac and download the ROM to it, if you power it on, nothing will happen anyway.