It promised a new way of interacting with your data, with new input methods and slick advertising. but the reality of the Apple Newton was a step away from what was promised.

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It appears that gravity, the same pesky force of nature that caused the edible variety of an apple to fall on Sir Isaac Newton's head, is causing one of Wall Street's tech darlings to fall as well.

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Apple's Newton OS was one of the first operating systems to save everything created by default.

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There was a huge amount of talk about PDAs before the Apple Newton.

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When comparisons were initially made between the Apple Newton and the original Palm Pilot, two of the most striking differences were size and input.

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From the apple falling on Newton's head to batteries made out of root extract, scientists have long turned to nature for ideas.

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History is littered with examples of products created before their time, from Ford's Edsel to the Osborne PC years ahead of Apple, and Apple's own notorious flop with the Newton (the iPhone's ancestor).

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We have a cultural picture in our head of Isaac Newton as an upstanding British gentlemen who discovered gravity by having an apple fall on his head.

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