There's a film out right now about what happens twenty-eight years after a catastrophic event in which the world's most promising technology is destroyed and a small band of survivors refuses to let go. This post is also about that, but with fewer zombies.
In 1993, Apple released a handheld computer called the Newton MessagePad. It was ahead of its time in ways that are hard to exaggerate: handwriting recognition, an object-oriented operating system, a software ecosystem built around the idea that your device should adapt to you rather than the other way around. It also had its own ebook format, years before anyone was calling them ebooks.
On February 27, 1998, Apple killed the Newton.
The community that had formed around the device did something unusual. They kept going. Not for a little while as a kind of extended wake, but permanently. Nearly three decades later, the Newton community is still active, still building, still solving problems.
To give you a sense of what "still active" means for a platform abandoned in 1998: Matthias Melcher maintains Einstein, the open-source Newton emulator originally created by Paul Guyot, which runs Newton OS on modern hardware. NewtonSales.com still manufactures and sells custom connectivity boards and replacement parts. Eckhart Köppen has released system patches that keep Newton OS running past date-related freezes that would otherwise brick the devices. New software is still being written. The same mailing list that was running in the '90s is still running today.
This is not a dead platform with a nostalgia club. This is a living community that decided the work mattered more than the company that abandoned it.
Even before Apple killed the Newton, a member of the community named Rob West started a project called Project Newtonberg. The idea was straightforward: take the public domain texts from Project Gutenberg and convert them into Newton's book format so they could be read on the device. Community members converted hundreds of titles. Rob curated the collection, maintaining a directory of links to NewtonBooks hosted on university FTP servers, user group mirrors, and personal homepages. He didn't have the server space to host the books himself, so the whole project was held together by a web of links to other people's servers.
This was 1997. Google didn't exist yet -- it wouldn't launch until the following year. The first Kindle was a decade away. And here was a community building an ebook library on the early web, distributed across infrastructure nobody owned, for a platform whose corporate parent was about to abandon it.
Over the years, the supporting infrastructure faded. The FTP servers went offline. The university mirrors disappeared. Rob West's own site -- members.aa.net/~robwest/pn/ -- is completely gone. I searched for it and found nothing.
But this is the Newton community, so the story doesn't end there.
When I posted about Project Newtonberg on the NewtonTalk mailing list yesterday, Grant Hutchinson replied within hours. The archive did exist -- just under a slightly different subdomain than the one I'd been searching. Grant had the link indexed in both the Newton FAQ and the Newton Glossary. The Wayback Machine has a snapshot of Rob's site from 1997, confirming the scope and ambition of the project. The directory is there. The books it pointed to are not -- those servers are long gone.
Then another community member replied: he'd collected the books themselves back when they were live. He still has them.
I don't know what happened to Rob West. I can't find any trace of him online. If anyone in the community remembers him, I'd like to hear about it. But consider what just happened: a project from the late '90s, built on infrastructure that no longer exists, hosted on servers that went dark one by one -- and within hours of someone asking about it, the community produced both the archived directory and a private collection of the files themselves.
The internet didn't preserve this. The community did. Not through any formal system, but through the same impulse that has kept this platform alive for twenty-eight years: someone thought the work mattered enough to hold onto.
This is a pattern worth paying attention to. Not because it's unique to the Newton community, but because it reveals something about how preservation actually works. We talk about the internet as if it's a library, but libraries have preservation mandates. The internet has terms of service. What survives is what someone cares about enough to keep.
February 27
Today is February 27th. Twenty-eight years ago today, Apple announced it was killing the Newton. The community responded by refusing to let it die, and they've been proving that decision right ever since.
I've been around the Newton community for a long time, and I've always wanted to contribute something useful to it. I'm working on that. More to come.
In the meantime: if you've never heard of the Newton, now you have. And if you're part of the community that kept it alive -- thank you.