My Newton MessagePad 130
Some time ago, my Newton MessagePad 130 stopped. It stopped responding to input; it stopped providing output; it stopped turning on. It, simply, stopped. This left me rather saddened, as I rather like the Newton OS and the only feasible replacement for the 130 would be a MessagePad 2000 or 2100. And, well, those go for 200 dollars or more, these days.
There’s really not much you can do to bring a Newton back from the dead. The hardware was never very well documented by Apple — in fact, the Service Manual is basically comprised of “Step 1: make sure it’s really not working. Step 2: send it to Apple.” So, every once in a while I would come across the 130, pull it out, plug it in and hope. And, I would be saddened by the complete lack of response and put it away again.
That is, until today. For, when I plugged it in this time a faint buzzinng was heard and a second later the screen came alive with black pixels. Black picxels arranged in such a pattern as to tell me the machine was booting up and would be ready to use in mere moments. This made (and, indeed, makes) me very happy.
Now, the 130 has it’s limitations. The 2×00 series can use a 10 Base-T Ethernet PCMCIA card, or a 802.11b Wireless card, and even a BlueTooth card. The 130 can handle none of these things as it is forever limited to Newton OS 2.0. (It’s version 2.1 that supports TCP/IP and supports the fun drivers…)
Thus, my connection options are limited to serial and I shall have to accept this and buy a USB Serial adapter for my PowerBook. This is useful because, even though Apple killed the Newton over five years ago, there is a thriving community which provides the neccessary software to sync the Newton with Mac OS X, and provides all the nifty drivers for technology that has come into vogue since the Newton was officially killed.
As a side note, here are the (brief) specs of my beloved 130 compared to those of my beloved iPod:
| MessagePad | iPod | |
|---|---|---|
| RAM | 1.17 MB | 32 MB |
| Storage | 1.29 MB NV-RAM | 10 GB hard drive |
| Screen | 5″ diagonal, 240×320 Black and White LCD | 2″ diagonal, 160×128 4 shade Greyscale LCD |
| CPU | ARM 610 RISC processor at 20 MHz | ARM7 RISC processor at 90 MHz |
| I/O | Pen w/ Natural Handwriting Recognition, External Keyboard, Serial Port, IR Port | Scroll Wheel, Five Buttons, FireWire, USB 2.0, iPod Remote |
I’m planning on buying a PCMCIA CompactFlash adapter, and adding at least 32MB of Storage to the 130 that way. (Yes, that will bring the total amount of menory in the MessagePad up to the amount of RAM in the iPod.) It’s amazing what 10 years of progress can do.
I just received two Newton Message Pads ( 110 & 130 ) that I bought on e-bay last week for only $40 including shipping. I was surprized by the size of them, For some reason I thought they would be smaller.
They are both in great condition and seem to be working ok, I was doing some research online to learn more about them when I came across your story.
I had never actually seen one ( Other than pictures ) until now, I’ve come across and seen pretty much every Apple/Mac computer made ( Ecept for a Lisa and TAM which I want very much ).
I’m sorry to hear that your message pad has passed on, If you have any information to share about Newton or anything about Apple please feel free to e-mail me.