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On the fourth Tuesday of every month, there is a small contigent of Newton users that convenes at the Printer’s Inc. Cafe in Palo Alto. We’ve been doing this thing since the Newton came out, the first meeting being in January, 1994. I remember the first time I went to a SNUG meeting. The people there scared me soooo much with their technical knowledge that I didn’t return until months later, when I had sufficiently learned the power of NewtonScript and programming for the Newton.

Many years later and far past the official “death” of the Newton at the end of February, 1998, at the hands of Steve Jobs and Apple Computer, we’re still meeting at Printer’s Inc. The group has outlasted the Printer’s Inc. Bookstore, which recently went out of business in both the Palo Alto and Mountain View locations. Over the past few years, friendships have developed between the attendees, so much so that it really isn’t about Newton anymore as it is about what’s been happening in our lives lately.

Tonight, the attendee list was rather sparse. Flash was off on vacation. Glen was nowhere to be found, and Lunatic rarely comes down these days because he lives in San Francisco. Peter Mueller and Dave Strom arrived though, and we spent the good portion of the night installing the SER-001 serial adapter into Peter’s Newton.

The Newton MessagePad 2100, a marvel of technology that in some ways has yet to be surpassed, came with this infernal dongle for the Newton Interconnect Port. The NIP was designed to carry a variety of signals, serial port, power, and audio in/out. However, nothing was really developed to make use of the NIP except for the serial port dongle, which was a big piece of rubberized plastic surrounding a standard Mini-Din 9 connector. Newton owners worldwide hated the dongle, because it was frequently lost or misplaced at a time of its greatest need.

A few months ago, an enterprising developer came up with the SER-001, a PCB that fit inside the Newton into a special connector that was reserved for the mythical Newton internal modem (mythical since it never was productized!). At the last meeting, Dave demonstrated how he installed the SER-001 into his Newton with great success (once we found out how to configure his modem to use the serial port). Peter decided to buy one and tonight we carefully installed the SER-001 into his trusty MP2100.

Taking apart a Newton is not a complicated process, but it has some hair-raising moments. They’ve packed so much electronics in the package! People like to snicker at the Newton, saying it’s too big for what it does. Well, let’s see… it has two PC Card Slots, a real speaker and microphone, a battery that lasts 24 hours continuous on a single charge, a 320×480 backlight screen, and a full-size pen. Yes, it is a big machine when compared to the Palm, but the Newton does a lot of things that the Palm doesn’t do well. But, to each his own. I use both and find that they are both useful and preferred in certain circumstances.

On a side note, I ran into Josh Rosenblum at the Cafe. I hadn’t seen Josh since I returned from Rhode Island and Clara’s wedding. Man, I still haven’t gotten that photojournal up yet. Stay tuned, pictures and great stories are coming soon from my Rhode Island adventure! Got to finish the Russian River Adventure trip photojournal too. Nooo, the backlog is increasing!!!

Meeting Yang

Lately I’ve been communicating over email with Yang Tang, a recent graduate from the Boston area who started working at Accenture in the Bay Area recently. He lives in classy Shallow Alto, so it was convenient for him to come by after training in the City to meet up with me. We had never actually met in person, as we’ve been communicating electronically. It’s always nice to meet new people from the online world, so as long as they’re not sketchy freaks or anything!

At any rate, Peter, Dave, and I showed him the Newton and all of its capabilities. Needless to say, Yang was pretty impressed, especially its superb handwriting recognition system. Yes, previous versions of the Newton’s HWR sucked, but the later iterations on the MP120/2.0 to the MP2100 were very, very good.

It was fun meeting Yang. Since he’s new to the area, he doesn’t know all that many people. The Bay Area is a whole new world compared to what use’s probably used to on the East Coast. Then again, if I was working at Accenture with its dress code,I might think that I’m working on the East Coast! What is it with the “highly recommended” blazer anyway?!?

At any rate, once Yang gets settled in Silicon Valley, I think that I’ll plug him into some of my social network events — at least until he develops his own network. He was telling me that some of his friends were planning on working here following graduation. Unforunately, the economic downturn changed their plans, as a number of them were laid off before they even started! Bummer. Still, even alone, Yang is going to love California and the Bay Area. All that he left behind is on the East Coast, so it’s time to start building something anew here.