Amaya Toman The company (then still) Apple Computer released its Newton MessagePad 1995 at the end of January 120. The "one hundred and twenty" came eighteen months after the release of the original Message Pad and boasted a number of improvements and some time later also the operating system Newton OS 2.0. In the mid-nineties of the last century, people could only dream about tablets - handheld computers became devices called PDAs - Personal Digital Assistants. The Newton MessagePad was a really great device, but as it soon became clear, it came too soon.
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While today's tablets are used by the whole family, the "digital assistants" of the time were mainly intended for professionals. MessagePad allowed for note-taking, calendar events, and a host of other useful tasks. In addition, it also offered smart input support, turning the text "Meeting John at noon on Wednesday" into a full-fledged calendar entry. Thanks to infrared sensors, it also offered the possibility of sharing data not only from one MessagePad to another, but also to competing devices.
Apple had grand plans for MessagePad. Frank O'Mahoney, one of Apple's marketing executives, called the MessagePad "John Sculley's Macintosh". For Sculley, the MessagePad really represented an opportunity to prove what Jobs had done before her - but the effort came to naught. Moreover, Sculley was only responsible for the birth of MessagePad, and by the time version 120 was released, he was no longer working at Apple.
At the time of its release, the Newton MessagePad was the fourth device of its kind that Apple had produced - it was preceded by the MessagePad, MessagePad 100 and MessagePad 110. Available in 1MB and 2MB versions, the device was equipped with a 20MHz ARM 610 processor and 4MB of upgradeable ROM. In terms of design, it strongly resembled the MessagePad 110.
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Despite the improvements, however, the MessagePad 120 was not entirely without problems. Users complained of difficulty recognizing handwritten text (which Apple fixed in Newton OS 2.0 with Rosetta and ParaGraph software). From today's point of view, many experts consider the MessagePad 120 to be really good, but in the almost pre-internet era, it did not enthrall users en masse, and the price of $599 with an additional $199 for the operating system upgrade was simply prohibitively high for most people.
Source: Cult of Mac
