Harry McCracken over at TIME Techland has written a beautiful piece about a 20-year-old piece of technology that was ahead of its time -- Apple's Newton MessagePad. As he notes, it was twenty years ago this week that Apple CEO John Sculley introduced the Newton to the public at a CES show in Chicago. The device wouldn't actually ship until August of 1993 and would fly for only five years before being axed by Steve Jobs upon his triumphant return to Apple, but it made its mark on the world and on Harry McCracken.
He never had an opportunity to write a review of the Newton, so he purchased a "new in box" first-generation Newton MessagePad H1000 off of eBay and set to work giving this piece of nostalgic technology a fair review.