I’ve always fancied owning an Apple Newton. I remember when they were released and I couldn’t afford one. Now it turns out that you can pick them up quite cheaply.

My “new to me” Newton arrived last week. It works, even the display lights up. It has a nasty scratch on the screen but this doesn’t seem to stop it from working. I’m missing the pen though, so I’m scouring the net for a replacement.

The biggest problem is that the internal clock just can’t handle 2026. It’s as if the Apple engineers didn’t expect people to still be using them 33 years after they were made. Apparently the trick is to tell the machine it is 1998, then the days line up.

The machine has a serial port, so I’m going to have a go at making it talk to a PICO and see if we can get data in and out of it. Such fun.