 Are we learning yet? |
Tuesday of the month, and you know what that means? The Stanford Newton User Group convened again in Palo Alto! This month sees more innovation in the Newton Community!
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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!
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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!
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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 11x16 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?
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What's a DVT MessagePad?
-- posted by Neil @ Tuesday, December 18 2001, 03:39 am
DVT and EVT are names given to developmental versions of hardware. PVT is given to hardware that is ready for production.
In this case, the DVT MessagePad is development version of the MessagePad. It may have minor hardware and software differences from the final production units that consumers see.
-- posted by Adam Tow @ Tuesday, December 18 2001, 04:10 am
Do you know a technical way to copy this hughly upgraded MP2x00? As fare as I know Newton´s OS only accepts System RAM up to 4 MB.
-- posted by Bernd Muellejans @ Thursday, April 18 2002, 7:43 am CDT
Well, the system flash is on a dedicated card that's removeable. If you can find the exact same flash ram used, you can solder higher density ones in place of or next to the existing ones. I haven't taken mine apart in awhile, but I think that there is place for extra ones on the card.
-adam
-- posted by Adam Tow @ Thursday, April 18 2002, 12:26 pm CDT
Adam Tow wrote:
Well, the system flash is on a dedicated card that's removeable. If you can find the exact same flash ram used, you can solder higher density ones in place of or next to the existing ones. I haven't taken mine apart in awhile, but I think that there is place for extra ones on the card.
(sure hope that HTML worked ...!)
I don't suppose anyone else has managed to duplicate that 11MB of flash RAM on a MP2x000 ....?
--gdw
-- posted by G.D. Warner @ Friday, October 18 2002, 13:45 pm EDT
MrPCBMan is trying to get the specs. for the 11 MEG. RAM, does anybody still have any info.??? Please???
Thanks!!!--posted by Woo Lee @ Wednesday, February 18 2004, 23:39 pm EST
As Woo stated, I would love to get some information regarding the DVT board. The best would be a short term loan if that can be arranged. Hi-res photos of the top and bottom of the board are a close second.
I already have access to a DVT board that has Flash instead of masked rom. This combined with the extra user Flash would make an awesome board! I can do one for the emate too.
Any help would be appreciated.
PCBman--posted by David Humphreys @ Thursday, February 19 2004, 10:07 am EST
this was immensly cool to see. i hope there will be an upgrade option as time passes by. i hate to see internal shrink beyond stability because of a larger database. id never rely on storage cards for certain tasks.
also, there is a certain amount of impracticality related to the use of a memory card, compared to internal. id love to use both expansion slots for functions rather than storage.--posted by Roman Pixell @ Thursday, February 19 2004, 17:35 pm EST
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