One of marketing whiz Sculley‘s chief contributions? Coming up with the phrase “personal digital assistant” to describe what the Newton would actually do for customers. At that point, the Newton moved from skunkworks project to full-speed-ahead development. (Bear in mind that all of this was in the late 1980s!) An infrared port would even allow the devices to communicate with one another. These included a touch-sensitive screen, handwriting recognition, a hard disk and a sizable battery. However, it grew unwieldy after Sakoman added to his wishlist all the cutting-edge mobile technology features showing up in research labs. He started the Apple skunkworks project that became the Newton in 1987. Passionately dedicated to handheld computing, Sakoman previously built the HP 110, the world’s first battery-powered portable MS-DOS PC, while at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s. The Newton was the brainchild of Apple engineer Steve Sakoman. “It was Sculley’s opportunity to do what Steve had done, but in his own category of product.” “It was Sculley’s Macintosh,” Frank O’Mahoney, one of the Apple marketing managers who worked on the Newton, told me when I interviewed him for my book The Apple Revolution. The device marked his first attempt to launch a game-changing new product line during his tenure as Apple’s chief executive. The Newton was often regarded, both internally and externally, as Apple CEO John Sculley‘s answer to Steve Jobs’ Mac.
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