Here’s a little bit of business history, a video that shipped on VHS along with Apple’s Newton MessagePad devices to help explain to you all the amazing things it can do:
One thing I think this does is reverse a bit of anachronistic conventional wisdom holding that the Newton was “ahead of its time” technology. The striking thing about the video, to me, is that even if you ignore the awkward size, the ugly screen, the lameness of the stylus, and assume the handwriting recognition works flawlessly they still don’t present any really compelling use case here. They show that you could use it to write out a document and then fax it to someone by attaching a Newton Modem, but why would you want to do that?
