For those interested, I’m going to post a few times on some old favorites. And for hand-held PDAs that offer handwriting recognition - the Apple Newton was the holy grail of this platform in the early nineties.

I happened to own and use the MessagePad 120*, purchasing it in early 1995 (before the 2.0 OS upgrade - ‘ya can’t win ‘em all). The device traveled with me on many consulting gigs all over Minneapolis and some business trips around the states until 1998 when I moved on to a newfangled Windows CE device.

For some, the original MessagePad 100/110 was more special, or the later MessagePad 2000/2100 that came along later in 96/97 and had much more advanced features.  Still, many will simply point to the handwriting recognition engine in the Newton, and the simple easy to use interface that took mere minutes to grasp.

The downsides of grayscale only, size, heft, performance, and difficult connectivity to Windows was a big hindrance to wide adoption.  Cost and functionality compared to the upcoming PalmPilot at the time made the Newton an also-ran in the PDA world.

I still have my MessagePad 120, and I still use it - for nostalgia’s sake.  It really was a nice device, but of course can’t compare to devices ten years later.

Resource links:

• Newton MessagePad 120
• Newton Gallery
• Apple Newton at Wikipedia

* - Did you notice that Apple kind of had Microsoft’s naming issues in the early nineties - Apple Newton MessagePad 120, they sure have improved i.e. Apple iPod.