Today in Apple history: Newton MessagePad inspires mobile revolution

August 2, 1993: Apple launches the Newton MessagePad, the first product in its line of handheld personal digital assistants. While it will become the most unfairly maligned product in Apple history, the Newton is a revolutionary device.

It predates Apple’s push toward app-based mobile devices 14 years later. And, while often dismissed as a failure, the Newton ranks near the top of the list of Apple’s most influential creations.

The Apple Newton: John Sculley’s Mac

The Newton was often regarded, both internally and externally, as Apple CEO John Sculley‘s answer to Steve Jobs‘ Mac. The device marked Sculley’s first attempt to launch a game-changing new product line during his tenure as Apple’s chief executive.

“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.”

The Newton was the brainchild of Apple engineer Steve Sakoman. Passionately dedicated to handheld computing, Sakoman previously built the HP 110, the world’s first battery-powered portable MS-DOS PC, while at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s.

He started the Apple skunkworks project that became the Newton in 1987. However, it grew unwieldy after Sakoman added to his wish list all the cutting-edge mobile technology showing up in research labs at the time. These included a touch-sensitive screen, handwriting recognition, a hard disk and a sizable battery. An infrared port would even allow the devices to communicate with one another. (Bear in mind that all of this was in the late 1980s!)

Sakoman left Apple in 1990. In early 1991, Sculley saw the concept. At that point, the Newton moved from a skunkworks project to full-speed-ahead development. This pivotal moment in Apple history marked the company’s ambitious attempt to revolutionize personal computing. One of marketing whiz Sculley‘s chief contributions? Coming up with the phrase “personal digital assistant” to describe what the Newton would actually do for customers.

The launch of the Newton MessagePad

The Newton MessagePad launch on this day at the 1993 Macworld Expo proved relatively low-key compared to the 1984 debut of the Macintosh. Still, Apple’s new handheld device garnered a fair amount of press.

Unfortunately, some of this took the form of parodies of the Newton’s technology. The Apple PDA’s handwriting-recognition software took an especially big hit. (It got spoofed in a Doonesbury cartoon and on The Simpsons.)

 In fact, the Apple Newton’s handwriting recognition actually worked impressively well. Consider two of its most stunning features (and again, let me remind you this was three decades ago!).

First, the Newton could recognize cursive handwriting as well as printed letters. Second, while the Newton MessagePad launched with a library of 10,000 words it could recognize out of the box, the device could learn new words just as iPhones do today.

That wasn’t the only bit of artificial intelligence that Apple built into the MessagePad, either. The PDA also showed contextual awareness of what a person was writing. For instance, scribbling in “Meet Killian Bell for lunch on Wednesday” would create an entry in the MessagePad’s calendar app at the appropriate time.

Speaking of apps, the first-gen MessagePad included a notepad, an appointment book and an address book. Impressively, it also incorporated Sakoman’s infrared transmitter, letting users “beam” data to and from other Newtons or — in a somewhat un-Apple move — to rival Sharp Wizard electronic organizers. Add-on hardware included memory cards, battery packs, power adapters and an external fax modem that linked the device to Macs or Windows PCs.

The Newton MessagePad: Ahead of its time

In all, the Newton MessagePad launched on this day in 1993 was an impressive $699 device that proved far ahead of its time. The sleek black look of the device was more reminiscent of Apple’s later iPhones than the “Snow White” design language of the Macintosh line in the early ’90s.

Ultimately, three things doomed the Newton: early negative press, a lack of internet connectivity (which would eventually make smartphones “must have” items), and Apple’s early 1990s identity crisis. (The company’s products proved too pricey for casual buyers but too risky and underpowered for business users.)

The Newton became a commercial failure — but it spawned many of the biggest successes Apple enjoyed in later years.

Apple Newton gets better over time

Although the Newton never wound up becoming a big hit for Apple, subsequent iterations of the device ironed out a lot of its early problems. By the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the final Newton — the MessagePad 2100 — had been released, offering the best iteration of the product yet.

By this point, Apple engineers had solved the early handwriting-recognition problems. The result was as useful a pocket device as you could expect in the days before ubiquitous mobile internet. Nevertheless, Jobs canceled the product line. He chose to focus Apple’s attention on blockbuster products like the iMac, the iBook and the iPod.

Do you remember the launch of the Apple Newton MessagePad? Did you own one? Leave your comments and recollections below.

Luke Dormehl

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.