August 27, 2006

It's nearly September, and we're headed to the Outer Banks, NC for a week at the beach in a few days. We took the same trip last year - actually, we arrived on the first day of Katrina. It was an odd and somber thing, enjoying the sunny weather outside on our vacation and coming in to watch the latest horrors taking place just a few thousand miles around the coast, in the Gulf. At any rate, besides enjoying the sun and watching the news, I was also negotiating the refurbishment and purchase of an Apple Lisa 2 computer, over e-mail down at the local WiFi-equipped coffee shop.

And, yes, it took me a full year to get the pics online.

While this is not one of the elusive and highly valuable original Lisas employing a set of the curious Twiggy 5.25" floppy drives, it is an interesting piece of computing technology. And it may have started life as an original Lisa; Apple offered Lisa owners upgrades to the 3.5" floppy-based Lisa 2, and most users took advantage. The first commercial computer with a graphical user interface, it's a most interesting machine with a most interesting history.

August 12, 2006

CNET UK recently ran a rather interesting head-to-head showdown, deathmatch, cage-fight comparison between the much touted (by Microsoft) Ultra-Mobile PC (codename "Origami") and the 10 year old Newton MessagePad 2000 from Apple.

The particular UMPC used in the comparison was the Samsung Q1. It debuted this year and features a true-color 800x480 touchscreen display, 1.8" hard drive, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and more, all powerd by a 900MHz Celeron and running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (say that five times fast). The Newton in question features a 320x480 greyscale touchscreen display, two PCMCIA slots, and Flash RAM storage, all powered by a 162MHz StrongARM processor and running NewtonOS. It's a simpler device. And sometimes simpler is better.

Becuase the 10 year old Newton beat down the UMPC.

In the 8-round battle, the Newton and the UMPC both showed their strengths and weaknesses, but it was the Newton's 30-hour battery life (twelve times that of the UMCP) and overall stability that set it ahead. It's quite a nod to the Newton Group to see that the MessagePad is still quite usable today. I'm pleased to have not long ago become reacquainted with my trusty MessagePad 2100.

Recommended reading for those interested: Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton