As the iPad rolls out across the United States on Saturday, one developer appears to have gone rogue already. Jonathan E. Vi, one of the few developers to actually get an iPad in advance of the launch, has rigged it to run Apple's old Newton personal data assistant from the '90s. Fire up the Newton emulator app, and the iPad's screen changes to that muted green color with dim gray text and the old Mac fonts.
It was easy enough for Vi to create the app, especially since the Einstein Project has been working on emulating the Newton since 2004. It's already available for OS X, so it was probably a simple matter to create a Newton emulator for the iPhone OS.
Whether or not the App Store will ever carry it is doubtful, so new iPad owners may have to resort to hacking in order to run Newton. But the Newton OS is still alive and well, running on the world's hottest gadget. No failures here.
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