Released to much hype, it simply didn’t live up to its expectations.
It was able to recognize one’s handwriting, whether one wrote on it with printed block lettering or cursive, but it did this by comparing what you wrote to a list of 10,000 words stored in its ROM (read only memory). So there was no way to expand that list of words. If it could find what you wrote among its list of words, the results were magical, but it would find a match even if what you wrote wasn’t in that list.
“People started to make jokes about the handwriting recognition,” Sculley says. “Here you’ve got some of the most brilliant computer scientists ever, doing breakthrough stuff that no one has ever seen before, and we’re getting slammed in the press because the handwriting recognition didn’t work.”
The peak of Newton-mocking arrived on August 26, 1993, in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip. In it, Mike Doonesbury is trying out Newton’s handwriting recognition. He writes, “Catching on?” And the recognizer types out, “Egg freckles?”
The strip became what today we’d call a meme. Along with a similar gag on The Simpsons, it turned the Newton’s poor handwriting recognition into a national joke.
But Steve Capps had an even funnier idea: He’d immortalize Trudeau’s joke in the Newton—as an Easter egg.
Getting the rights to the published cartoon, however, would have alerted Apple’s lawyers to what Capps was up to. Instead, he decided to perform an end run. He’d ask Trudeau himself to draw a custom version of that same comic frame, exclusively for use in the Newton’s 2.0 software.
To produce the custom Easter egg, you’d write “egg freckles” and then tap the Assist button.
Improbably, Capps and his wife tracked down Trudeau’s phone number and reached him at home. Trudeau had never heard of an Easter egg—but once he understood the idea, he agreed immediately.
And so it was that Garry Trudeau drew a custom version of his cartoon, satirizing the Newton, that Steve Capps immortalized in the Newton.
The Newton team eventually sent a MessagePad to Trudeau to thank him. He got the handwriting to work pretty well, he says, “but you have to write really slowly. I found myself printing more legibly than any time since the fifth grade.”
Pogue goes on: “The reviews for the Newton were painful. “Apple promised too much and failed to deliver a useful device,” said the New York Times. Newtons were “best suited as random non sequitur generators.”
What Pogue neglects to mention is that it was David Pogue himself who wrote that scathing New York Times critique.
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