On Friday, Perri and I made a brief excursion to the Adams Morgan area of Washington, D.C. to pick up my most recent acquisition in person (thus saving a considerable amount on shipping costs). After a delicious lunch at The Diner and a relaxing drive back home through Rock Creek Park, we arrived home where I immediately began poring over the new kid in town:

Why a second eMate? Wasn’t the first one enough? Well, one never knows when one might need a spare, especially considering that they aren’t exactly being cranked out by the boatload anymore. Plus, I’m actually thinking about fitting one with the hard-to-find 4 MB RAM expansion card — which not only boosts the eMate’s available memory to something approaching usefulness, but also doubles the unit’s speed by increasing the system bus bandwidth — and making it a dedicated, go-anywhere writing tool. Okay, so it may not have the processing power or memory capacity of my MP2K, but for what I need, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, I composed, edited and uploaded this entire post on the old one. (Oh, and for the record I had mine hooked up to the wireless network at home long before this post from TUAW; in fact, that’s the same wireless card I have in the picture.)

There’s just one minor problem with my new friend. Although the unit is in fine cosmetic shape and appears to be otherwise functional, it seems that at some point in its history, somebody set the security PIN code, which prevents unauthorized access. You can see the PIN request screen more clearly by checking the larger photos in this Flickr set. The woman from who I purchased it doesn’t know the PIN, as it wasn’t originally hers either. Without the security PIN, there’s no way to get into the system short of performing a brain wipe, which is simple enough on a regular MessagePad but much more difficult on an eMate.

You might expect that some enterprising Newton OS developer would have come up with a solution to this conundrum, and you’d be correct: Battering Ram Pro is a package (Newtspeak for “application”) which will bypass the security PIN on Newton OS devices. All you have to do (allegedly) is download the package onto a PCMCIA memory card, insert the card into the device, and restart the unit. Simple enough, right?

Well, when you’re dealing with old hardware, sometimes things become more complex as you delve further into them. You see, the only types of PCMCIA memory cards natively supported on Newton hardware are linear flash cards, a type of memory card still in production, but more difficult to come by than the average CompactFlash card. Luckily enough, I just happen to own a 4 MB card, and am using it on a regular basis in the MP2K. All is well!

Er, not exactly. Remember what I said about old hardware? That card is actually stuck inside my MP2K, thanks to a combination of a missing eject button for the upper PCMCIA card slot, and my own stupidity at failing to remember this fact before inserting a card with no protruding edges — unlike, for instance, the aforementioned wireless card normally used in that slot. D’oh!

So I’m now trying to locate another linear flash card from a colleague which I can use in the interim, just to get this other eMate off the ground. I haven’t even checked to see what version of the OS it’s running, or whether the battery is in anything approaching decent shape (I do have a spare, though).

But in the end, the important thing is that I now have five Newton OS-based products in the house; the two eMates, the MP2K, a MP120, and a MP100 in a box (not NIB, mind you, just in an original box). Good thing I’m already married, eh?

ph34r.

You wouldn’t expect Dolby surround 5.1 by a setup like this, would you? Good. The Newton Messagepad 2100 was last sold by Apple in 1998. It’s amazing enough it can handle mp3s today (at 22050 Hz mono 32 kbps).

I’ve known the MP2000/2100 has basic MP3 playback capability for a while, but haven’t investigated the process with my MP2000 yet. I might end up giving something like this a try, if I ever get hold of a BT PCMCIA card. There’s a bit of software trickery involved, but it’s hard to picture a nerdier MP3 player, including anything Apple’s shipped since 2001.

(UPDATE: fixed the link, sorry about that.)

I sincerely hope Apple decides to eventually throw some official support behind projects like this. It’d be terrific if they would open-source the platform, but patents or legal issues may not allow that. Then again, there’s always the speculation that the platform could reemerge as a new product…

So what do you get? A lot, including a rare third-party unit which used the Newton OS:

Original Newton MessagePad – Three versions boxed
1. MessagePad with Modem Macintosh Version
2. MessagePad with Modem Windows Version
3. MessagePad only version
Motorola Marco Wireless MessagePad (with extra battery & charger)
Newton 100 boxed
Newton 110 boxed
Newton 120 – Three versions boxed
1. Version 1.3 ROM
2. 1MB Version
3. 2MB Version 2.0 ROM
Newton 130 boxed – Brand new box opened to take photos
Newton eMate boxed
Newton 2000 boxed
Newton 2100 no box

Plus a ridiculous number of extras, accessories, and software. Pictures of the entire collection are available at the museum site.

I’m sorry to see the museum have to close down after such a long time; the owner is running out of space, both physical and hosting. Of course, what really makes me sad is that I don’t have the $2,100.50 + $80 shipping (at the time of this post, anyway) to make it my own. I do have a few Newtons floating around myself, along with a selection of elderly Apple equipment in the house; perhaps I’ll be in a position to start my own museum sometime next year.

Of course, now that I know there’s a VNC client for the Newton, things just got more interesting for me at work.

To paraphrase Voltaire: if there were no eBay, it would have to be invented.

The eMate 300 was Apple’s last Newton product, sold to the education market. Unlike the other models, the eMate included a built-in keyboard and had a case of translucent plastic, similar to the original Apple Studio Display 15″ flat-panel screen (and over a year before the original iMac made that same translucent design all the rage). It was markedly slower than the MessagePad 2000 and MessagePad 2100 models and had less memory, but it did have NewtonWorks built-in, and offered microphone/line-out ports and shipped with the same version of Newton OS as the MP2000 and MP2100. All three models featured Apple’s Rosetta handwriting-recognition engine, which offered far superior results to the engine included with older models. (That same technology lives on in Mac OS X as Inkwell.)

The eMate was born at a time when Apple was finally starting to turn the corner with the Newton; Palm had not yet established itself as firmly as it eventually would, and with the MP2×00 models and their improved HWR helping to erase the Newton’s reputation for, shall we say, imperfect results, Apple made plans to spin off the platform into a separate company. Around this time, however, Steve Jobs returned to Apple as interim (later permanent) CEO, and one of his first decisions was to kill the Newton entirely. Officially, it was due to poor sales and a desire to focus on the core Mac line, but seven years later speculation remains that Steve axed the program because it was a pet project of John Sculley (the man who forced Jobs out of Apple in 1985) and Newton, Inc. was the brainchild of Dr. Gil Amelio (the then-CEO of Apple, who Jobs himself replaced).

Despite all the politics, the eMate remains a desirable computer. With the same ease-of-use as the other Newtons, along with a virtually silent keyboard and integrated handle, it’s a near-perfect totable. I may end up taking it to work to use as a note-taker and network tester, plus it’d be easier to carry over to El Tiempo Latino than a PowerBook.

Oh that’s right. I went there.