Newtons, at least the 2000/2100, and possibly the 130 IIRC, supported PCMCIA Ethernet cards, including both WaveLAN IEEE (first gen 802.11 DSSS) and Proxim RangeLAN (first gen 802.11 FHSS) wireless LAN cards.

But the NewtonOS user experience was very much based around an occasionally-connected model, with syncing between the PDA and a "master" device or beaming between PDAs, and built-in support for inbox and outbox stores that would accumulate items to be dealt with once connectivity was lost or regained.

So although there ended up being a bunch of TCP/IP-based Internet stuff for Newtons, it was very much "bolted on the side", even more so than MacOS and Win95 around the same time, because the interaction model was hard-wired against constant connectivity.

Newtons also supported an infra-red version of AppleTalk, using an adapter connected to the built-in AppleTalk connector. This supported the usual AppleTalk network services -- wireless printing was the most useful.

Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple. But perhaps most crucially, Jobs hated the stylus, and thus we got multi-touch gestural input, which is perhaps the major differentiating feature that the iPhone popularized.

> Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple.

What makes you believe that?

> But perhaps most crucially, Jobs hated the stylus, and thus we got multi-touch gestural input, which is perhaps the major differentiating feature that the iPhone popularized.

If the iPhone had supported stylus input from day 1 touch wouldn't have evolved nearly as well. Developers would say "just use the stylus" and been done with it. Modern mobile had to go through an evolutionary phase where touch was the only input method to get where it is today.

Imagine if Netscape Navigator had arrived first on the Newton, along with a WAN card.

> Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple

:(

It would have been a crash prone buggy piece of shit like it was on every other platform?

I see not much has changed in terms of the web, web browsers, and web apps.

No, modern browsers aren’t crash prone. They are just memory hogging, battery killing monstrosities - except for Safari.

Web browsers have definitely progressed:

In the bad old days you'd have to restart your web browser because it crashed.

Now you have to restart your web browser because it has consumed all system resources, spun up the fans to maximum, and slowed performance to a crawl.

And those weekly severe security vulnerabilities don't crash your browser anymore - they just enable it to be taken over by criminals.

Netscape would crash the entire Mac pre OS X back in the day. I didn’t have any such issues with Adobe, Aldus, or Microsoft software.

While MS did do some crazy stuff to kill Netscape, IE was just a better browser.

IE 3.0 for the Mac was native code and the most standards compliant browser in existence for awhile.

You really need to consider Safari instead if that’s how bad it is with Chrome etc.

In the bad old days, you would have to restart your computer as well. I remember Netscape frequently crashing back in the day and that bomb icon from Mac OS System 7.

Personally, the one feature from PDAs that I miss from modern smartphones is the Graffiti system of text input.