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On the fourth Tuesday of every month now for the past several years, the Stanford Newton User Group convened at Printer’s Inc. Cafe in Palo Alto. The numbers were once strong, though in recent years the group’s numbers have dwindled to only a handful of people each meeting. With the “death” of the platform in 1998 at the hands of Apple executives, who would think that people would still be using it years later?

This past Tuesday, we had an all-time high of people, 8 Newton devotees. At this point, we might outlive the Printer’s Inc. Cafe! There weren’t that many people there that night, a far cry from the heyday of the dot-com industry, when the place was packed with would-be millionaires. Gregory, Flash, Peter, Kevin, Dave, Wayne, Eric, and I arrived at or around 8:00 to comment on the state of Newton and to catch up with old friends.

Wayne was a new member of the group, having only recently sworn himself away from Palm and Handspring. Picking up a couple of discarded Newtons, he dedicated himself to becoming a power Newton user. In his hands was a most powerful Newton, an MP2x00-series MessagePad with 11 megabytes of flash memory on board! That’s right, an addition 7MB of internal flash storage (see in the picture at the top of this page). Apparently, Wayne had found a DVT MessagePad with the 11MB flash card and swapped it into his main machine. Cool!

Gregory brought his BackTalk-equipped Newton, which allowed us to beam information back and forth between a Palm-powered handheld. We couldn’t figure out how to send data from the Newton to the Palm, but we successfully transferred Palm addresses into the Newton. Greg also had the Dragon Systems voice recognition software on the Newton, but we didn’t have an external microphone (and corresponding Interconnect dongle) to test that feature out. Think about it, voice recognition on the Newton 4 years ago!?! Handwriting recognition that worked, an operating system tuned for mobile computing, and more! Take today’s miniaturization technology and Newton technology, and I assure you that cool things are still possible. Or… maybe they are happening, in today’s closed doors at handheld computing companies round the globe.

It was cool talking with Kevin, who had recently returned from a cross-country motorcyling trip. He’s done a couple of these in recent months, and it’s always good to hear his stories of where he went, who he met and where he stayed. America is still a big place… CNN and McDonalds hasn’t fully penetrated the countryside yet. Just make sure that you get yourself a room with a working analog telephone, shower, and toilet and be on the lookout for the roaches!

A cross-country trip in a convertible roadster for 2 months. Now that sounds like a plan to me!

Over the past two days, we’ve celebrated the birthday of Dave Golden at work and the anniversary of Jon Abilay. Congratulations to you two!

After the SNUG meeting, I drove a short distance to Randy’s place, where I crashed for the evening. Seems like I’m pretty tired these days in the evenings. Must be the onset of Fall or something… old age perhaps? We fiddled around with the VX2000 in preparation for this weekend’s wedding. Today, I bought a couple extra Mini-DV tapes to record our footage. Randy had spiked his hair for a company picture. It must have taken a lot of gel and blowdrying… that thing could have been declared a sharp object on the airlines!

Last night, I also helped Clint get his Epson 2000P printer configured with ColorSync on his Macintosh. Using heavyweight matte or archival matte paper and ColorSync, I’ve been getting consistently good color results from my printouts. I’m pretty pleased to say that I’m able to print up to 11×16 photos on the 1280. In the 15th century, Gutenberg’s printing press heralded a new era in information distribution to the world. The power to distribute, however, lay within the grasps of only a few individuals and corporations. Today, anyone can be their own newspaper company, their own cable tv station. Who would have thought?