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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

One of the most fascinating things about the Newton is that its systems and applications were written in Dylan, a LISP-like language, though that seems to have been replaced by NewtonScript.

https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899

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One of the things that fascinates me about the history of the Newton is that if it weren't for complaints from those advocating C++ that escalated to John Sculley (who ruled in their favor), we may have ended up with mass-market machines that ran a Lisp operating system. There's a wonderful interview between lispm and Mikel Evins, two regular contributors on Hacker News, that can be found at http://lispm.de/lisp-based-newton-os.

I'm quite fascinated by pre-1997 Apple's projects. Before Jobs' return, Apple was an unfocused beacon of innovation; in its attempts to find a successor to the classic Mac OS, it explored various paths, but none of these paths led to a successor until Apple bought NeXT. Apple's more radical explorations during this era seem to have a profound Xerox PARC influence. Xerox PARC is probably most famous for Smalltalk and its GUI. However, there are many people who don't know that Xerox developed its own Lisp environment, Interlisp, which was known for its GUI (not all Lisp innovations came from MIT). These explorations ended once Apple committed to NeXT technology for its foundation in 1997, and today Apple has been pursuing its own direction (e.g., the iOS human interface guidelines, Swift, the gradual inclusion of iOS UI/UX elements and practices in macOS) that is distinct from the Xerox PARC, classic Macintosh, and NeXT traditions.

Apple in the mid-to-late 90s was fascinating. You could see they were trying but had little to no direction. Not that Jobs was the best person ever to run a company, but I believe it was only him who could've saved Apple.

If Apple didn't buy NeXT or if Jobs didn't want to come back, it's an interesting "what if" to determine who would've led them and what they would have done. I could totally see MS _STILL_ investing heavily in them in order to help with their own antitrust issues at the time.

In my opinion, the most interesting alternative timeline of Apple's history would have been had Pink/Taligent been released sometime around 1993 or early 1994, coinciding with the release of the original Power Macintosh lineup and thus beating Windows 95 to the punch by well over a year. In fact, it would have been quite revolutionary: a workstation-grade OS with protected memory, cooperative memory, etc. but installed on consumer-grade hardware; in our real-world timeline, this wouldn't happen until 2001 when Windows XP and Mac OS X were released (yes, I'm aware that the Amiga had protected memory, and yes Windows NT was around, though it was marketed to workstation users). Imagine everyday users having a rock-solid OS in 1993. Pink/Taligent would have also stolen NeXT's thunder since Pink/Taligent also provided an object-oriented development framework, but unlike NeXT, Pink/Taligent would have had a much larger install base. NeXT probably would have either pivoted or folded, and Steve Jobs would've probably been more well known for Pixar.

Then again, pre-1997 Apple courted larger companies like IBM and Sun for mergers. Apple under John Sculley almost merged with IBM; given the AIM (Apple/IBM/Motorola) alliance and also the fact that Taligent and was jointly developed with IBM, I can see a timeline where Apple and IBM merged as a way for IBM to take back control of the personal computer business from Microsoft and Intel. There are all sorts of fascinating possibilities.

Oh for sure. The possibilities are endless. Even with OS2/Warp and BeOS, there was a lot of competition brewing that could've either acquired Apple, Apple acquiring them, or some sort of merger.

I completely forgot about the AIM thing until you mentioned it! Damn those were the wild west days of computing.

Dylan was never on the Newton. The Newton team had two proposed products, Senior and Junior. Senior was gonna run Dylan, but they kept waiting on the Dylan team to produce something usable, and it never happened. So they gave up on Senior, dumped the notion of using Dyan entirely, and finished Junior using NewtonScript to get the product out the door. That became the Newton.

Yeah, that's what Walter Smith says:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400696

Ironically, I see my old comment has two autocorrect typos. :)

I've read somewhat opposite account, that there was a complete Lisp/Dylan system available, but there were issues both political and hardware related that ultimately led to C++ (which was then hot new stuff still) being used with NewtonScript on top.

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