A season six episode of The Simpsons has a bully scribble Beat up Martin on his Apple Newton, only for the screen to read Eat up Martha. The joke stuck, and with it the idea that the Newton was nothing more than an expensive failure. This episode makes the opposite case. The project began in 1987 with engineer Steve Sakoman, nearly died when he left in 1990, and was revived when Michael Tchao and Steve Capps pitched it directly to CEO John Sculley, who coined the term personal digital assistant and put roughly $100 million behind it.

The hardware it needed did not exist. Larry Tesler saw that no chip was both powerful enough and frugal enough for a fanless handheld, so Apple turned to Hermann Hauser of Acorn Computers and helped found Advanced RISC Machines, now Arm. A young Jony Ive worked on the design. Then the MessagePad shipped in August 1993, 14 months after its announcement, with handwriting recognition that became a national punchline.

• Garry Trudeau spent a week of Doonesbury mocking the device, and Egg Freckles became shorthand for tech failure. Apple later hid the panel in the operating system as an Easter egg.
• Newton OS stored data in an object database called the soup, so a birthday entered in Names appeared automatically in the calendar.
• Walter Smith’s NewtonScript language was elegant, but Apple charged developers $1,000 for the toolkit while the cheaper Palm Pilot and its Graffiti alphabet won the consumer market.
• Steve Jobs killed the line in early 1998, citing weak sales and his hatred of the stylus. It was also the signature project of the man who had ousted him in 1985.
• Larry Yaeger’s neural network recognizer, Rosetta, lived on in Mac OS X as Inkwell, and Michael Tchao returned to Apple in 2009 as vice president of iPad product marketing.