Debugging Softwareįor two years, the Newton researchers had toiled away, creating mockups and sample software. Named Figaro, the product would cost well over $6,000 and wouldn’t be released until 1992. The first Newton would be an A4 sized slate with a hard drive, an active matrix LCD, and infrared for high speed, long distance networking. The engineers had no restrictions on size or cost, so they started piling features onto the product. Sakoman and Capps feared that the project would balloon in scope and ultimately create something so expensive that it would flop. To run the enormously demanding handwriting recognition software, the tablet would have three AT&T Hobbit processors. It would be the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper (8.27″ x 11.7″) and would have cursive handwriting recognition and a special user interface. Sakoman’s end goal for Newton was to create a tablet computer priced about the same as a desktop computer. The Newton researchers started work on a specification for a tablet computer. Sakoman gathered a team of engineers (including Finder coauthor Steve Capps) and moved into an abandoned warehouse on Bubb Road in Cupertino, in the same vein of the Macintosh team almost a decade before. Because Apple’s original logo (right) had a rendering of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an Apple tree, Sakoman decided to name the project Newton. The first thing he did was select a name for the project. Gassée got permission to start the project from Sculley (without telling him what was being researched), and Sakoman set to work. To keep the talented Sakoman from defecting, Gassée proposed creating a skunk works project to create an Apple handheld computer. The plan fell through, since it appeared that Apple would probably sue the nascent company. He wanted to leave Apple to work on handheld computers, and he recruited Jean Louis Gassée to lead a brand new company that would be bankrolled by Lotus founder, Mitch Kapor. He found the work uninteresting, however.
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When Jobs left Apple, these laptop plans were scrapped, and Sakoman helped lead the teams creating the Mac Plus, Mac SE, and Mac II. Steve Jobs hired Sakoman in 1984 to help work on a laptop version of the Macintosh after the successful release of the HP Portable. HP was uninterested in handwriting recognition, and Sakoman was assigned to help design the HP Portable (right), one of the earliest laptops. He hoped that eventually keyboards would be rendered obsolete and people would use touchscreens to interact with computers equipped with handwriting recognition software. While Sakoman was at HP, he worked with alternative input devices centered around different configurations of keypads.
Steve Sakoman was especially cognizant of Apple’s dependence on the Macintosh. Sculley believed that such a device would be the next big thing in the computer industry, and he desperately wanted Apple to be the company to develop it. One video showed a college professor working with the device to effortlessly prepare a lecture while the computer created the graphics and simulated different models. The machine would anticipate your needs and act on them. Knowledge Navigator was going to be a tablet the size of an opened magazine, and it would have very sophisticated artificial intelligence. He commissioned two high budget video mockups of a product he called Knowledge Navigator (right). John Sculley, Apple’s CEO, had toyed with the idea of creating a Macintosh-killer in 1986.
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