Yep, I was there and trying to get the Newton project off the awful ATT chip
they had first chosen. Larry Tesler (who worked with us at PARC) finally wound
up taking over this project and doing a number of much better things with it.
Overall what happened with Newton was too bad -- it could have been much better
-- but there were many too many different opinions and power bases involved.
If you have a good version of confinement (which is pretty simple HW-wise) you
can use Butler Lampson's schemes for Cal-TSS to make a workable version of a
capability system.
And, yep, I managed to get them to allow interpreters to run on the iPad, but
was not able to get Steve to countermand the "no sharing" rule.
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <je...@merlintec.com>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
>Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 9:17 AM
>Subject: [fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)
>
>Alan Kay wrote on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:53:21 -0700 (PDT)
>> A hardware vendor with huge volumes (like Apple) should be able to get a CPU
>> vendor to make HW that offers real protection, and at a granularity that
>> makes
>> more systems sense.
>
>They did just that when they founded ARM Ltd (with Acorn and VTI): the
>most significant change from the ARM3 to the ARM6 was a new MMU with a
>more fine grained protection mechnism which was designed specially for
>the Newton OS. No other system used it and though I haven't checked, I
>wouldn't be surprised if this feature was eliminated from more recent
>versions of ARM.
>
>Compared to a real capability system (like the Intel iAPX432/BiiN/960XA
>or the IBM AS/400) it was a rather awkward solution, but at least they
>did make an effort.
>
>Having been created under Scully, this technology did not survive Jobs'
>return.
>
>> But the main point here is that there are no technical reasons why a child
>> should
>> be restricted from making an Etoys or Scratch project and sharing it with
>> another
>> child on an iPad.
>> No matter what Apple says, the reasons clearly stem from strategies and
>> tactics
>> of economic exclusion.
>> So I agree with Max that the iPad at present is really the anti-Dynabook
>
>They have changed their position a little. I have a "Hand Basic" on my
>iPhone which is compatible with the Commodore 64 Basic. I can write and
>save programs, but can't send them to another device or load new
>programs from the Internet. Except I can - there are applications for
>the iPhone that give you access to the filing system and let you
>exchange files with a PC or Mac. But that is beyond most users, which
>seems to be a good enough barrier from Apple's viewpoint.
>
>The same thing applies to this nice native development environment for
>Lua on the iPad:
>
>http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
>
>You can program on the iPad/iPhone, but can't share.
>
>-- Jecel
>
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