Post #4347936

2026-08-03 05:35 UTC

Only a day later, and I am finding myself significantly more impressed at the handwriting recognition on the MessagePad 2100. Yes, I’m slightly changing how I write to try to fit that, but if it’ll result in more readable chicken scratch, then this is only a good thing. But, like, this was all handwritten, with only a handful of corrections made, and only to change the capital M’s down to lowercase m’s. No ducking autocorrect! (I need to do the patch that’ll let me set the date to a current one, the Newton had its own y2k38 problem about a decade ago due to using 16? 24? bit Ints to represent date) #AppleNewton

Replies (3)

@younata@hachyderm.io 2026-08-03 06:03

I also haven't gushed enough about how much I absolutely ADORE espy sans (the default Newton system font. Used in the app/icon names and such. It's not the font for the text of the note, which I believe is Sand?). My introduction to Espy Sans was the iPod Mini in 2004, and to this day Espy Sans is my favorite font. Apple knocked it way out of the park with that. Unfortunately, Espy Sans is not going to make an (official) comeback because it's a bitmap font, and truetype fonts are definitely a better technology. #AppleNewton

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@scott@sfba.social 2026-08-03 06:03

@younata@hachyderm.io Thanks for sharing these photos and observations. It brings back memories. Newton was the best. I wish we could have the Newton mental model and UI but with the benefit of modern compute power. It was so far ahead of its time. You mentioned soups. Such a great concept for what was then called a PDA. Now we have apps, each its own walled garden. I guess some data can be accessible different places (like contacts) but on Newton it was seamless as I remember. Also wow that backlight was a really distinctive color, eh? 😅

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@oscherler@tooting.ch 2026-08-08 22:31

@younata@hachyderm.io I loved the shortcut to change capitalisation on the Newton: double-tap to select the word, and draw a vertical line (upwards for uppercase, downward for lowercase) in the middle of the word to affect the whole word, on the first letter to affect it only.

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