Newton was conceived on an airplane. That’s where Michael Tchao pitched the idea to Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, in early 1991. The company would announce it the following year, and the first product in the Newton Line, the MessagePad 1001 went on sale twenty years ago this week in August of 1993. It was Apple’s handheld PDA–a term Apple coined to describe it. By modern standards, it was pretty basic. It could take notes, store contacts, and manage calendars. You could use it to send a fax. It had a stylus, and could even translate handwriting into text. Well, sort of. At the time, this was highly ambitious. Handheld computers were still largely the stuff of science fiction.
“The goals were to design a new category of handheld device and to build a platform to support it,” explains Steve Capps, the Newton’s head of user interface and software development who both helped dream it up and make it real. “The restrictions imposed by battery life necessitated a new architecture.” That is, with Newton, Apple didn’t just set out to create a new device. It wanted to invent an entirely new class of computing. Computers that could slip into pockets and go out into the world. In fact, the pocket was a core design requirement.
