Rainer Joswig
Hamburg, Germany
Email: joswig@lisp.de

Einstein Emulator DP3, Emulator of the Apple Newton for Mac OS X.

Though the Newton OS was not the hoped for Lisp-based operating system (which had been worked on inside Apple), it had quite a few lessons from Lisp, Self and Smalltalk. Software was mostly written in NewtonScript - running compiled or interpreted on a byte-code interpreter on an ARM-processor. It had stuff like late binding, symbols, lambda functions, a prototype object-system, run-time compiler, remote listener, remote interface builder, garbage collection, persistent object store and more. Most Lisp programmers will easily get up to speed coding with NewtonScript, though it does not use SEXP-syntax. One of the wonders of the Newton OS was the small size of the programs - both as package and in RAM memory - though some of the software for the Newton was extremely sophisticated - like DateMan and MoreInfo. Einstein is emulating the Newton hardware and even supports the ROM of the Newton Messagepad 2100 D. Actually it works. I've downloaded the ROMDumper.pkg with Newton's Nethopper web browser from my CL-HTTP server to the Newton, made a ROM dump of my MessagePad 2100 D and started the Einstein Emulator on my PowerMac G5. On the PowerMac G5 the speed is even acceptable. Btw., the export type for Newton packages under CL-HTTP is like this: (http:define-url-export-type :newton-package :pkg (:application :x-newton-compatible-pkg) :copy-mode :binary) If you want to talk with NetHopper to a CL-HTTP web server, you have to add this patch to CL-HTTP, since NetHopper has a little bug: (defmethod http::write-header :around ((header-name (eql :content-type)) header stream) (call-next-method header-name (if (and (eq (http::current-user-agent) :nethopper) (consp header) (> (length header) 2)) (subseq header 0 2) header) stream))

Links:

Einstein Emulator

Comparison of Dateman and MoreInfo (german)

United Network of Newton Archives, amazing amount of software and documentation

Keywords:

NEWTON