This is an extract originally written by Ross as an email prior to OxmacUGs March meting on PDAs.

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Right. PDA.
Is an acronym for: "Personal Digital Assistant".

Apple president John Sculley came up with the term for a MacWorld speech in the early 90's on his vision of the future of computing. This was part of his "Knowledge Navigator" concept, which were to be a group of portable digital devices that would enable people to carry & access digital content with them wherever they went. Apple were to be at the forefront of this technology, delivering Newspapers, Books, etc. via electronic means. Of course he didn't foresee the advent of the Internet, but then again, neither did anyone else.

Still, the concept was sound, and Apple's "skunkworks" department had been working on concepts and prototypes of the "Sputnik" (i.e. Satellite) device since roughly 1987. They did a lot of thinking, and a lot of work, and identified the issues that are still the basic tenets/ foundations of PDA design to this day:

Purpose: Handheld computer to effectively work as a Personal Organiser/ Filofax on steroids, with communications & networking capabilities, that will supplement and extend, but not replace, the use of desktop or Laptop computer.

Requirements: Light, Portable, Compact, completely intuitive to use, good at interfacing with other devices, and having an exceptionally long battery life.

Biggest Issues: How to synchronise data between different devices? How to get information into the device? (Keyboard? Voice? Pen?)

And there we are. Not bad for a précis that was written 15 + years ago.

And what of these PDA thing-ies now?

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PSION:

In the early 1990s there were already a few simple electronic personal organisers on the market. Most grew out of scientific calculators and the like. (If that sounds like a slight, it's not intended to, because early on, these devices were easily the most productive/ useful PDA's out there.)

The best of these types of device were made by Psion. (uh-oh -- now I'm getting into subjective opinions here; feel free to challenge or disagree). I remember being blown away by how fully realised the Psion III was when it was unveiled in the early 90's. It was the size of a thin paperback book, and opened up along it's spine to reveal a sharp mono LCD screen on the top half, and qwerty keyboard on the bottom half. The system and software were The Business, battery life was good, but the bugbear was the miniscule keyboard, which was too small to touch-type and had no tactile feedback. Still, it was a huge advance in function and form-factor, and Psion and the EPOC operating system quickly established itself as a serious player in the market.

Getting info out of a Psion was a dawdle, but it was much more challenging to enter it.. Additionally, I seem to recall that there were some challenges if you wanted to synchronise or back-up to a Macintosh. (At least I -think- that's what kept me from buying one...) Of course, these issues seem to be the conundrum of PDA's to this day.

Psion went on to address many of these issues an extensive way with the Psion 5 series and 7 series, (and later the very whizzy NetBook & NetPad) which were all very impressive upgrades, but they never really caught on in a big way outside of the UK. Thus, Psion unfortunately dropped out of the PDA market in mid 2001. Which is a shame, because for that type of device, the Psion was never bettered.

Though I should mention that if you go to the Psion website, these devices are still in-stock and on sale. (they still have 3mx's, 7's, and Revos for sale, and promise full support through the end of 2004). I seem to recall Psion are now part of the Symbian group, working on OS's for cellphones, etc.

I believe that Simon (& Peter?) will be on hand tomorrow night to show us some of their Psion's capabilities. (I fear my summation here has been terribly reductive, and probably somewhat inaccurate. But hopefully it conveys the general idea).

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NEWTON

In the late 1980's Apple looked at all of the existing methods of implementing PDA's and decided not only to dream Really Big, but to write the cheque to turn their wildest fantasies into a reality. (The budget went a ways into 10 figures.) For -their- handheld PDA, they were going to create, from scratch, an entirely new operating system. Their machine would feature entirely new applications written in new development languages, to run on entirely new hardware, which was to be completely solid state, and to have instant-on, instant-off capability. (i.e. no boot-up). This was all to be done in-house, and be based on a technology that hadn't yet been developed: Pen Input/ Handwriting Recognition with cybernetic capabilities. (i.e. it learned from its mistakes.)

If nothing else they couldn't be accused of lacking of the "Vision Thing". So, they took the brightest of the Original Lisa/Macintosh team, (Capps, Atkinson, Hertzfield, and dozens of others) gave them a clean slate, an unlimited budget, and off they went to create the ultimate "insanely great" device. (Which they very nearly did.)

Sounds pretty promising. And after 5 years of development, the Newton MessagePad was unveiled after a spectacular build-up by Apple at MacWorld Boston in 1993. But just 4 years later, the project was scrapped amidst derision and massive losses, and Apple got out of the PDA business altogether.

So what went wrong? Entire books have been written on this topic, and it is a bit of my specialty subject, having worked (albeit briefly) for Apple UK on the Newton project. I'll try to be very brief.

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In the early 90's it was believed throughout the industry that PDA's were the next Holy Grail of computing. ("A Trillion dollar industry" they said.) So there was an almighty level of investment and competition. Sony, Motorola, AT&T, Phillips etc, created General Magic and the Magic Cap operating system to run on their Go wireless communicator series. (This had actually started life as an in-house project at Apple called "Paradigm", and was later spun-off as a separate company). Then there was Psion, as well as another consortium which created PenPoint, and of course Microsoft were finishing off the first incarnation of PenPC. I seem to recall that there were some others as well, but Apple were determined to trump them all with the best technology that time and money could create. (Looking back, it was a halcyon period of computing, because there was so much promising technology competing to be first. Most of it was (and is) still very good, even in retrospect.)

Given the size of their investment, Apple Corporate believed that they HAD to make a big splash, (since they weren't first to market), in order to make the Newton the standard for PDA's the way that the Macintosh had become for both Hardware and Software. Hence, the original Newton was released in mid-1993, rather prematurely, and over the anguished objections of the development team who worried that it wasn't ready for prime-time.

What was worse is that the marketing hype badly over-promised and under-delivered. The result was an over-priced underpowered unit, whose breakthrough/ ubiquitous technology (Pen Input/ Handwriting Recognition) didn't work well (or at all) for most people. (Actually, it worked pretty well for me, but that's due to my handwriting; not great, but as luck would have it, easily recognized by computers). There's no question that the Newton looked "the business", and had some excellent software, and innovative capabilities, but most people found them, well, unusable.

The result was that the Newton was lampooned as Apple's Edsel. (Christian, I'll let you explain that one). Which is a shame, because even then it was rather amazing, despite it's limitations. (And it's not as though the Newton was the only handheld platform with problems. Within 18 months, PenPoint and Magic Cap had gone under, and Microsoft's PenPC was an even bigger disaster than the Newton -- but because it wasn't widely promoted, most people never noticed. 10 years later, they're still refining it.)

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Once Apple Corporate realised the error of the premature release, the development team begged for, and was once again given, a clean slate and unlimited budget, to finish what they'd started. There were incremental releases along the way (the Newton 110, 120, 130) but after an intense 2+ years of additional work, they unveiled the completely revised Newton OS 2.0, running on the Newton MessagePad 2000, in 1996. To this day, I would argue, that it is the most amazing single piece of pure technology that Apple have ever produced.

While it now looks oversized, the MP2000 was a breakthrough in every respect, and fully realised the brief that had been originally set out for the unit. Yet, within a year of that 1996 release, and after a single upgrade, Steve Jobs cancelled the Newton outright upon his return to Apple. Why? Again entire books have been written about this, and there are dozens of reasons and theories, but the plain fact came down to economics. Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio (all CEO's of Apple) had effectively bet the whole of the company's cash reserves on the Newton, and lost.

In a nutshell, Newton technology (both hardware and software) was too advanced to be profitable. Think Apollo Moon Missions; an amazing feat for its' day, but too expensive to keep going. Like Concorde, the Newton PDA seems destined to become obsolete without ever having been bettered.

(Indeed, I still have 6 Newtons, and not a day goes by in which I don't useat least one of my Newtons, despite it being 7+ year-old technology. In fact, despite having tried a number of different PDA's over the years, I have yet to find one that can match it. Indeed, there is -still- a thriving community of Newton Users, and Application developers. And if you look on eBay, used Newtons still sell for more than most current PDA's.)

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Despite the fact that they'd corrected the problems and delivered on their dream, the Newton's bad reputation was a difficult thing to shake. It also didn't help that they were Very Expensive (over $1000 for a MP2000), and ran only Newton Applications over a proprietary (though ridiculously-advanced) database, which couldn't be modified on other platforms (including the Macintosh). As a business unit, Newton never broke even. (By the end, the NBU cost Apple $250m a quarter. Ouch.) When Jobs came back, Apple was in real danger of going to the wall, and he decided that he had to focus every available bit of resource on converting the Mac OS into OS X. In retrospect, he was probably right to have done so.

Which rankles me to say, especially considering where the Newton Technology could have been by now. To this day, NDA's prohibit me from talking about the Newton Prototypes that were in the pipeline at the time it was axed. Suffice it to say that they were jaw-dropping. Without any question, given time to develop, Newton could/would have become an outright contender to both Windows, and to the Macintosh.

Which, in retrospect, is probably part of why it was finally axed. There were a number of people on the Apple Board who though Apple should ditch the Macintosh and Focus on the Newton, which really angered Jobs. And while I am very sympathetic to those who favoured the Newton, I can't fathom a world in which we were stuck with Windows as the only desktop OS. Given the options, Steve almost certainly made the right decision; it's just too bad it came down to one or the other...

Intriguingly, even now it seems that no one has the resources and vision to come up with anything close. Though, (cue Twilight Zone music) Apple still own all of the Newton Technology to this day...

SO, will Apple ever come out with another PDA? Ever since the Newton was axed there has been wild speculation about this, but nothing's surfaced yet.

The iPod has some very basic PDA features, and the Newton Handwriting Engine (now called InkWell) has now been integrated into Mac OS X and can be used via a Wacom graphics pad, but that's as far as it's come. Presumably Apple will only come out with something if they can make a real breakthrough. Rumours abound...

(And to add grist to the mill, just last week, Apple hired back a former alum, who was the VP of development at PalmSource, in charge of merging the 'Be' operating system which Palm acquired from Be Inc, into Palm v6.0. Interesting...)

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Geez, here I am rabbit-ing on at length about the Newton, and I've barely touched on what it can do. Whoops; knew I shouldn't have had a pint at lunch. Ah, well, OK. Um, if you want to find out more... then come along to the meeting and find out. 7 years on and no longer supported -- they're certainly not a PDA solution for the masses, but most people think they're cool, even in 2003. I still mostly use mine for basic stuff, but James and Nas have "pushed the envelope" a bit with theirs, and there are new capabilities being added all the time. Come along and judge for yourselves.

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I'll follow this up with a "PDA's – Part Two" tonight or tomorrow, that covers PDA's that are like, still actually manufactured, and developed and supported. If you're 'in' to that sort of thing.

Palm/ Handspring/ Sony
Pocket Windows (Compaq iPac)
Linux. (Sharp Zaurus)

I guarantee that Pt 2 will be a fraction of the length of this email, as I don't know that much about those platforms. (Not, of course, that it stopped me from rabbitting on at length here...)

Part two

Ross