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April 08, 2003
Old Technology ...
The other day I was scribbling notes in a pad (on the bus) which outlined various topics to add to my blog. As I was doing it I was thinking to myself (well it doesn't really help to think at anyone else unless you are telepathetic or something):
... Scribble, scribble, ... neat if I could scribble this straight on my laptop ... if only, I could have got a seat, then I could get the laptop out ... why is the bus so crowded today ... wretched school kids taking all the seats, don't they know better ... what is the world coming to these days ... one of those rumour sites was talking about tablet macs ... silly how they (the rumour sites) whip all all this enthusiasm which leaves people disappointed afterwards ... much better to read CARS which only guesses about the immanent release of apple branded sexbots ... wouldn't it be cool to just write the ideas of digital paper ... deja vu ... Newton ... haven't I got one somewhere ...
Time for history: many years ago when the earth was young and Windows XP wasn't even a dream in the mind of marketeers; there was a young (well younger) geek who had a work related accident and lost his short term memory. While this eventually recovered, he resorted to using digital paper - the latest, best and most expensive digital paper - the Newton 120. Later he upgraded to a Newton 2100 and later still, in a fit of absolute annoyance at Steve Jobs he traded it for a Palm Pilot which was smaller, cooler and much more useless. In fact the Palm V developed a really annoying jitter in the screen and the software was lousy and you had to write in its style instead of it learning your style and ... and ... and ... I really regretted trading away that Newton. In the meantime the 120 had found a new friend in a younger brother who ultimately rejected it. Rescued from a pile of junk it was stored with all the other important "stuff I might need to do something with later if I ever get around to it" (does anyone else have boxes like that?).
Wind forward to the near present and MacOS X. This cool handwriting stuff appears (if you have a tablet) and when you take an icon off the dock there is this little cloud of smoke and you sort of remember the fun of the Newton. Back when nobody knew what they were supposed to do except that they could really learn your writing and they were the ultimate geek symbol.
So I dug out the old Newton, gave it new batteries and tried it out. No drama (after a quick reset of the recognizer). Fantastic. If only I could get it to talk to the Mac. After all I must have some software and cables in one of the boxes somewhere ...
P.S. I didn't really think of the href bit in the stream of consciousness, I added that later. I think it would be a sign of terminal geekness to actually think in html.
Posted by Ozguru at April 8, 2003 05:04 PM
Comments
Posted by: Ozguru at April 8, 2003 05:04 PM
