AT&T Eo (was Re: Before the iPad, there was the Newton)

On 07/28/2010 03:40 AM, Adrian Burgess wrote: You can easily replace the batteries in that with standard NiCAD C cells (I think). I suppose in a pinch you could just replace it with regular alkaline C cells just to get it to power on - but obviously NEVER try to plug in a charger. The battery pack is just a heat sensor + all of the C cells wired together in series held together by shrinkwrapped plastic. Not sure about the power supply (don't have it infront of me, but if I remember, I can lookup the specs when I get home.) The Eo 880 has completely different sized NiCAD batteries, I'm not sure you can easily make replacements. Might be A or B cells. The 880 has a scsi port and a completely different internal hard drive - not sure what kind either are, but they don't look like anything standard. The 440 and 880 aren't that different otherwise, the 880's slightly faster and might have a larger hard disk, plus the scsi port. I vaguely remember them having a floppy port, but not sure which machine (or maybe both) had it. They also might have had parallel ports. My 880 came with a dead ROM, but I was able to get it to work using the ROM board from a 440 - I hope there's no extras on the 880 ROM card. The ROM card looks sort of like a PCMCIA card, but with a different connector. The dead ROM looked like it had a manufacturing defect, as if there was extra paint that prevented the soldering from working. They were awesome machines, and the Penpoint OS was quite nifty. Looked like a tabbed notebook, with each tab being a different application. I recall there was a tab UI for Windows 3.1 that resembled it. Penpoint's HWR sucked when compared to even an original Newton - you had to write each letter in a specific box, and even that didn't work right. Of course Newton Intelligence 2.0's HWR killed everything else's hand writing recognition, too bad the ipad doesn't use that. Rumor has it it's still (or was?) part of OS X, but I've no idea how to enable it, or use it. There was a copy of PenPoint for a specific black and white IBM Thinkpad (TP730?) which had an intel 386SX chip that ran at a faster clock rate, but was of course much slower than the Eo's Hobbit CPU. That Thinkpad could run a Pen version of Windows 95 as well. The magnetic pen from this machine could work on an Eo, but had a button that acted as the right click mouse button. I think there was some issue with the sensitivity of this pen when used with Eo's - if you got too close to the Eo's screen it would misread the location. Both sets of machines used a magnetic digitizer, so a regular stylus wouldn't work. If you don't have that specific pen, or one similar to it, your Eo is going to be unusable. Maybe some early Wacom (or other) tablets use this, not sure. The Hobbit CPU is an interesting beast. Not quite CISC, not quite RISC, they called it a CRISP processor I think. It's actually a stack based CPU that uses the stack (and of course the cache) instead of registers. Beautiful assembly on this beast... The only other machine that uses it AFIK was the original pre-release BeBox. This was originally designed to be friendly to C and C++, but of course Apple went with ARM instead for the Newts... If you had the cellular module you'd know it. It adds quite a lot of extra plastic to the bottom and has a desk phone handset on top. It's completely worthless now - at least in the US as analog cell service has been shut off. see: http://www.pcworld.com/article/188228/atandt_eo_440_personal_communicator_1… AT&T even had a data service for it (beyond the fax application) that was based on the uucp commands. Was probably just email. Not sure. If you do manage to power it up, see if there's any interesting software on the hard drive (if it has one). I think there was a spreadsheet and some other office software for it.