Newton Power at the Hardware Meetup

We had a splendid hardware meetup this evening. I found out three more things that my robot software doesn’t do but should, and a great time was had by all. I really must take more (or at least some) pictures of these events.

Walter brought along an Apple Newton 2000 which is one of the last (and most powerful) handheld versions. I’d not seen one before and it took me a while to actually open the front of the device. But once it was open we popped out the battery and rather than finding a proprietary and no doubt broken rechargeable unit we instead saw a holder for AA batteries. So, thank to the generosity of the folks at Hull Makerspace we got hold of a set and fired it up. It worked fine. Even the backlight.

I don’t know what components they were using 30 years ago when the Newton was made, but they must have been pretty good ones. I’m going to bring along some of my Newton devices to the next meetup, which will be on the 24th of June. If you’ve got a “blast from the past” device that you want to bring along and show us we’d love to see it.