January 30, 1995: Apple Computer launches the Newton MessagePad 120, the first truly great device in an unfairly maligned product line.
Coming 18 months after the original Newton MessagePad, the upgraded PDA packs more power — and truly shines once Newton OS 2.0 rolls out.
Newton MessagePad 120: Apple’s first tablet gets better
The Newton MessagePad product line proved astonishingly ahead of its time. In fact, the Newton laid the crucial foundation for much of Apple’s later success with mobile devices like the iPod, iPhone and iPad. However, it debuted about a decade too early to truly take off.
The PDA lets users take notes, make calendar entries, etc. It even featured surprisingly smart artificial intelligence to make use of contextual data. For instance, writing the phrase “Meet Killian Bell for lunch on Wednesday” would create an entry in the MessagePad’s calendar app at the appropriate time.
The device also allowed users to beam data to other Newtons or rival electronic organizers via an infrared transmitter. This early attempt at seamless data transfer was a precursor to features seen in later Apple devices and plays a key role in iPhone history, which you can explore further here.
John Sculley’s new Apple product line
The Newton was often regarded, both inside and outside Apple, as CEO John Sculley‘s answer to the Mac. The PDA was his first attempt to launch a game-changing new product line.
“It was Sculley’s Macintosh,” Frank O’Mahoney, one of the Apple marketing managers who worked on the Newton, told me when I interviewed him for my book The Apple Revolution. “It was Sculley’s opportunity to do what Steve had done, but in his own category of product.”
By early 1995, Sculley had been gone from Apple for more than a year. However, the Newton MessagePad project continued at a frankly dazzling pace. Cupertino produced so many variations that it’s a bit confusing to make sense of them today.
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how confused the Apple device lineup was in the mid-1990s, consider this: Despite coming just a year-and-a-half after the first MessagePad shipped in 1993, the Newton MessagePad 120 was already the fourth model Apple made.
Newton MessagePad 120: Code name Gelato
Photo: Apple
Code-named “Gelato,” the MessagePad 120 followed the original Newton MessagePad, the MessagePad 100 and the MessagePad 110. Spec-wise, the device packed a 20-MHz ARM 610 processor and 4MB of upgradable ROM. It came in 1MB and 2MB options.
Design-wise, the MessagePad 120 looked basically identical to its MessagePad 110 predecessor, although it lacked that model’s rubberized surface.
Initially, customers who bought the MessagePad 120 used the same operating system that shipped with Apple’s original PDA. Later, they could upgrade to the vastly superior Newton OS 2.0, which corrected many of the problems associated with the first model.
Newton OS 2.0 adds Rosetta and ParaGraph for better handwriting recognition
These problems included dodgy handwriting recognition. Newton OS 2.0 fixed that with new Rosetta and ParaGraph handwriting software (the first for printed text, the second for cursive).
The upgraded mobile operating system also let Newton MessagePad 120 users sketch shapes on-screen, which would then be recognized as deformable vector graphics. In other words, scribble a circle on your MessagePad and the device would recognize it as a circle.
In addition, just like iPads and the phablet-size iPhone models that would arrive more than a decade later, Newton OS 2.0 allowed users to choose between landscape and portrait orientations.
It even brought a proto-Siri feature, whereby you could ask questions like, “How do I [do a certain thing]?” (although not via voice recognition). The Newton would then guide you through the necessary steps.
Apple collectors: Is this the Newton MessagePad for you?
As I’ve mentioned multiple times in “Today in Apple history” posts, I’ve got a massive soft spot for Apple during the 1990s. Sure, if I was investing in Apple at the time, I would’ve hated it (unless I had the foresight to hold onto my shares). But it was an era when Apple was taking some massive risks and truly — to use a later phrase — “thinking different.” It was a fun, albeit frustrating, period to be an Apple fan.
The Newton MessagePad epitomized this. The first-gen device was ever-so-slightly crippled, so it never achieved the marketplace momentum it should have. A pre-internet device, it would have benefited immeasurably from connectivity. That is exactly what made the iPhone such a big hit years later.
If you were going to pick up a MessagePad today to see what all the fuss was about, the Newton MessagePad 120 with Newton OS 2.0 is the first model for which I could give an unequivocal recommendation. In this way, the product line really was Sculley’s Macintosh. As with the Mac, it took a few iterations before Apple finally nailed the formula with the Macintosh SE/30 in 1989.
In 1995, a Newton MessagePad 120 cost $599, with an extra $109 for the operating system upgrade. Today, you could probably pick one up for a hundred bucks (or even less if you’re lucky).
As a piece of iconic Apple equipment, it’s never going to have the same value as a first-generation iPhone or an original Macintosh 128K. It really should, though.
Do you remember the Newton MessagePad 120? Leave your comments below.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
10 responses to “Today in Apple history: Newton MessagePad 120 becomes Apple’s first great mobile device”
Actually, investing in Apple in the 1990’s would have been a stunningly brilliant idea. If I’d any idea that Amelio would buy NeXt, I would have taken out a second mortgage just to buy Apple stock.
Jobs’ return as iCEO gave the stocks a boost and when the iMac was introduced a year later there was an enormous jump. The impact of the iMac on the industry was stunning. Within a year the consumer market was flooded with translucent plastic. I remember that shortly after returning, Jobs sold $2 million of his stock. A year later the stock value doubled, so he missed out on making $2 million.
As for the Newton, I liked it, but I wasn’t in a sector where PDAs made sense. If I were a sales guy, I would have bought a 120.
A peripheral issue (excuse the pun) was that by the time the 120 showed up, Newton peripherals were hitting the market as well.
You’re 100 percent right about the NeXT buyout, which is why I added the bit in parenthesis. Apple’s 1995 – 2005 turnaround was stunning.
Cheers for the comment, though. It’s always interesting to hear the recollections of those using these tools at the time. I was at school when the MessagePad was out, so remember it being used (by the few of my friends who had them) for taking notes in class etc. rather than as business devices.
It’s a fascinating case study, though — not least because it gets written off so often as a total joke, which is entirely unfair.
There are those who still have their knives sharpened for Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury (the most popular strip for college kids, yuppies and techies with a daily circulation at the time of around 1400 newspapers). That one single strip that showed the Newton garbling the text made a permanent stain. It was the putt of jokes on talk shows, of stand-up comedians, and just about everyone else. And when the 2100 and 2200 appeared in 1997 the prices were extreme – $1,375 and $1,500 in today’s dollars. It was definitely cheaper than a laptop (the Powerbook 2400c/180 would cost $5,200 in today’s dollars) but those models were twice the marketable price.
One reason why Apple couldn’t take over the PDA market was really a component issue. Apple had to come up with a lot of stuff from scratch, whereas mainstream PDAs worked on modifications of mass-market components (It is cheaper to tweak than to create from scratch). The PDAs of the day didn’t do much but they were affordable. And then, when the Blackberry came out in 1999, PDAs went on fire sale.
It was not until 2007 and the iPhone that the PDA became ubiquitous.
The Palm became pretty ubiquitous around the time of the Palm III (at very least in the corporate world, but it did very well in the consumer world as well) – everybody had a Palm (many still calling it a “Palm Pilot” even though Palm dropped the Pilot before it got super popular.
Thing is, everybody who bought a Palm III knew they needed it, knew they needed to “get organized”, but didn’t know what to do with it.
Newton was a problem for Apple because it was a project that was meant to save the company. Project Newton was supposed to be the next generation of computing, but became a consumer product when Apple raided R&D looking for something new to market. Apple, who created a new product category, struggled to define it. They asked the question “What is Newton?” But couldn’t answer it.
BTW – Garry Trudeau later recanted his comic when the MP2000 was released.
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I already had a MessagePad 100 and I waited until I could buy a MessagePad 120 with 2.0. But I did pre-order it and got it the first day they were available. I was in love with that thing.
After that I bought Newton Toolkit and became a professional Newton developer which was my favorite system to develop for ever.
I do remember the MP120. My first Newton was a MP110 and upgraded to the 120, then the MP2000 (upgraded to 2100) (I eventually bought a MP100 and MP130 for the collection).
I remember the 110 fondly because it was my first, but I remember the 120 because it lagged so bad (especially under Newton OS 2.0).
I never had any of the issues with Newton OS 1.3 that others had. I also thought the 1.x OS was closer to the original vision than 2.0 (which got more complex).
Don’t get me wrong though – the best years with Newton were on the MP2000 with OS 2.
I really loved the Newton. I used it on a daily basis as my main mobile device from February 1998 to January 2013 (when I got my first iPad Mini).
“Today in Apple history: Apple’s first great MessagePad”
I still have my original Newton 100, in it’s original box, sitting on the shelf. It’s not only a thing of beauty, but when loaded with batteries it fires right up and works great. It was a breakthrough device. And to this day, the text selection and editing features of the Newton (and the Palm Pilot), FAR exceed that of the iDevices. Double-tap text, Cut, Copy, Paste and Move with the stylus were as easy on the Newton as they are using a trackpad on a Mac. Too bad Apple didn’t implement these on the iPhone/iPad family. Long live the long gone Newton!
I loved it. I think that Palm stole the idea and make it more usable by simplifying the Newton.
But I prefered the latter.
I bought a message pad 120 about a year after my first Newton, the 110. I was a bit disappointed that the one 20 was not noticeably faster than the 110, but the newton OS 2.0 was a huge improvement. I was a devout Newton user from the 110 until about a year after Steve Jobs canned the Newton product, by which stage I had four of them, including an upgraded message pad 2000 and a secondhand 2100. However, the 2000 was the real breakthrough in my opinion. It was fast and generally awesome.
Only stopped using the 2100 in 2003. It wasn’t until the iPad came out that I forgave Steve for canning the Newton.