Embedded - 262: Egg Freckles

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

Noah Leon made a film: Love Notes to Newton. It features the people who love and the people who built the Apple Newton. We spoke with him about the Newton and about filmmaking. Noah runs Moosefuel Media. He wanted to mention Frank Orlando of OrlandoMedia, the art designer for the film and promotional material. Profits from Love Notes to Newton go to Be The Match, a registry of bone marrow donors. You can sign up for the Newton mailing list at NewtonTalk.net. The book about the Newton development is Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton by Markos Kounalakis. The documentary about Compaq is Silicon Cowboys (Netflix).  

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White. My co-host is Christopher White. Do you remember Newton? Oh, not the crime fighter slash mathematician slash physicist, but the little handheld PDA that did handwriting recognition via neural network in 1992. Yeah, some people still have them. Some people still love them. And maybe love is too tame a word. Noah Leon is here to tell us more about the wonderful world of the Apple Newton, the love note of a movie he made to it, and the people who are still obsessed with it. Hi Noah, it's a pleasure to speak with you today. Hey guys, nice to be on. Could you tell us about yourself?

So I am a primarily wedding cinematographer based out of Montreal, Canada. And I kind of grew up making movies and the best outlet for that when I got older was being a wedding and corporate cinematographer. And I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to make real films, mostly documentaries. And so that's kind of the direction that I've headed. So is making films your day job? Yes, it is. I do wedding and corporate cinematography and a lot of stuff you can see on my website cool what is your website just for it's moose fuel dot media moose moose moose like

the animal fuel like gasoline i really want to say muse for some reason i really want to say museful yeah well actually i can i consider changing it to museful because it would be kind of for like an artist that'd be kind of a cool name but at the same time it's kind of cheesy so no it's just by the domain just in case just in case in case i change my mind speaking of cheesy let's get to lightning round all right this is where we ask you short questions we want short answers but uh and if we're behaving ourselves we won't ask you all the hows and whys. I'm going to go first this time because I want to link in the whole cheesy thing. If you only had one for the rest of your life, would it be poutine or hockey?

Oh, poutine for sure. What kind of a question is that? A terrible one. New York or monterey bagels monterey i've never had monterey bagels let's retake that i'll edit all of this new york or montreal definitely montreal i have a funny story about that all right let's go ahead oh well and yeah you know andre yes right andre chichak from the great white north right he introduced me to you guys um he was actually featured in the documentary too he's a newton guy he has uh he developed for the newton he had uh he did a lot of hardware for the newton and uh I interviewed him. And he mentioned that he liked bagels.

And so how I sort of paid him for his interview was I mailed him about three packages of Montreal bagels after the interview. And so he really appreciated that. Actually, that reminds me I have to send him some more. I think, you know, he actually fed us that question. And I think maybe that was why. So you have a lifetime bagel tribute going to Edmonton now. Yeah. So I don't know if you guys can expect any bagels,

but you know, maybe I'll think about it. Do you have a tip? Everyone should know. Jeez. I don't know. Don't, don't make a film. It's really hard.

I was hoping for like a lighting tip or something, but okay. Lighting tip. Um, use natural light because it's free and it looks better than your three point lighting setup. Are you someone who likes to complete one project or start a dozen? Yes. Best Apple product ever? Oh, the Newton, of course. Well, I think we should talk about it.

Even now. Okay, so what is the Newton? The Newton was a device in a category that Apple invented called personal digital assistance. And it was supposed to be a computer that you carried with you. Everybody kind of knew that computers were getting smaller and there wasn't like the internet or anything like that, but they knew they were going to have to communicate with these things. And so Apple was really kind of ahead of the curve in bringing something to market that they thought was going to be really great and it was this little handheld device that had a pen and a touch screen and little little by is a relative term i guess little by uh 1990s standards but it was this really cool little

computer that uh it never gained the mass market appeal that they kind of thought it should um but uh there nonetheless were people who really adored the machine and really um really liked it why did why do people still love it i mean it's it's pretty outdated technology at this point right um well for me i got my first newton when i was maybe about 10 or 11 and this was was in the mid-90s at the time. And I got it used for $15 from a guy who, I guess, it just, he didn't really, he must have got it as a gift or something like that. He was a college professor. And just when I brought it home and I started using it, it just blew me away that there could be a device, even in the mid-90s, that was so kind of advanced and had such a cool paradigm. It's

kind of like how Steve Jobs said that the iPad was kind of magic. And the Newton was kind of like that for the people who used it. I think most people never touched a Newton, but for the people who did, they really kind of understood what Apple was trying to do. And I think that is what captured people's imaginations, not necessarily what the Newton did, because the first version was pretty, the handwriting recognition was pretty poor, but kind of the vision of the device is this magical notepad

that you'd carry around with you and do cool things with. And what year did it first come out? So it was 1993. Apple had been promising the Newton since 1992. And so 1993, if you think back, that's just before the internet. That's pretty early in terms of handheld computers. So I think that they really came to market quite a bit too early, quite a bit before the technology, because one of the things that made companies like BlackBerry or, um, even some of the early Palm smartphones really kind of take off was just being able to communicate really effortlessly, uh, through email. And so it's just, it's interesting that the Newton came out so early.

And then, then they killed it. I mean, then Jobs was rehired back from Next, and suddenly the Newton was abandoned, despite a huge and incredibly fanatic fan base. Was it huge or was it incredibly fanatic? They made a lot of noise. they did make a lot of noise um yeah i think the the story of the newton it's um they announced it too early and they got people's expectations very high and so when the first device came out i think that if they had just just brought out the device without raising people's expectations

so high, I think people would have been a lot more impressed. But they promised too much and delivered too little. And then over the next five years or so, they spent time building up the Newton and finally making it work properly. They had much better handwriting recognition, which is still by today's standards very good. They made it faster. They made the screen better. But by that point, the magic was kind of gone. People weren't paying attention anymore, except for this small fan base who realized that this product was getting better and that it was kind of becoming the device that was promised. And then by the time steve jobs came back apple was in a lot of financial difficulties for a lot of reasons most of them not to do with the newton

and the newton was just starting on the cusp of being profitable and then he came in and cut pretty much everything the newton included and there was a lot of good technology there and i think he wanted some of that intellectual property, which he sold to Microsoft in order to keep Apple afloat. And he wanted some of the engineering expertise back in Apple, because by that time, Newton had been spun out as a separate company out of Apple. And yeah, so it's kind of a, it's a story about,

kind of about, it's like the Icarus story where you flew a little too close to the sun and you flew a little too close to the sun and his wings melted. So crashed back to earth. It's kind of one of those kinds of stories, except after the crash, there's this fan base, which kind of took of those kinds of stories except um after the crash there's this fan base which kind of took up the machine and really made it their own and

wrote software for it and built hardware hardware for it and kept it going probably longer than apple did well since they're still keeping it going yeah well um the newton project actually started in the late 80s, around 87 or so. So that was when it started as a little kind of a skunkworks research project at Apple to figure out what the next big thing was. And they figured it was going to be pen-based computing. And they were kind of a little off because now we have these touchscreens that we use our fingers on. But back then, you couldn't really do that effectively on a portable device. And so pen computing was really what everyone thought it was going to be.

This came out before the Palm Pilot. Yes, absolutely. I just want to make sure I have it right in the history of things. Because the Palm Pilot was, I mean, people were completely addicted to them. Yes. And Palm did a lot of things right that, that Newton, the Newton team hadn't figured out. They didn't, they didn't over-promise and under-deliver.

They had a handwriting recognition system that if, if you screwed up, it was your fault. It wasn't the device's fault. If you remember graffiti, you had to write all the, little letters. And they synchronized with your PC really well, which was something the Newton couldn't could never quite get right. It was kind of its own little computer, the Newton, whereas the Palm was more of like a satellite kind of the way the iPod was like a satellite for your Mac. Can you tell me about the handwriting recognition? It started out one way and then it switched to neural nets. Right. So the handwriting recognition was originally developed in the Soviet Union,

the former Soviet Union, by a guy named Stepan Pachikov. And he and a team of Russians were working to create this handwriting recognition system. And they did a demo for some guys at Apple. And the Apple guys decided that they wanted it for some secret project. And so the guys at Paragraph, which was Stepan Pachukov's company, moved to California. And they developed this system this handwriting recognition system um for apple and they were never told uh what the device it was going to be used in was and so they developed it in the dark and then right like a few weeks before

they found out that um it was for this handheld handheld device called the Newton. Maybe these were the rumors. They weren't told anything. And then they also found out that they were going to be limited to a 10,000-word dictionary because the ROM space on the Newton was very tight. And so how their software works is it matches your words to words in its dictionary. And so that led to a lot of the jokes about Newton, where he would misrecognize your hand writing recognition and write egg freckles or something like that. It could have been a really great system. And later on, those guys went on to develop Evernote. And so they were great engineers. But it wasn't until the Newton version 2.0 where they brought in Larry Yeager. And he's an amazing guy.

I got to interview him. And he talked for a long time about his neural network system of handwriting recognition. And I actually had to do a lot of reading to kind of understand what he was talking about. Because I'm not really like a programmer or a very technical person. But it's pretty amazing what he did with the limited processing power of the time. And he was really able to make what he calls the world's first usable handwriting recognition system. And it was. I still use my Newton to take notes sometimes, and it's a very workable system. The only catch is that you can't write in cursive. You have to print.

Whereas the older system, you could write cursive as well. It's pretty amazing because just as the neural net system was coming out on Newton, it was about the same time they were building that huge digits database from the post office and being able to correctly identify those. I mean, there were parallel things happening, and one was trying to do words, and one was trying to do just numbers. And yet the Newton, I mean, people who love it say it works really well i don't remember ever using one although i remember having a doctor who pulled it out and and when i asked her about it

she just loved it to pieces i think i got to play with one for a few minutes somebody we knew had one um but it it amazes me they used a neural network because now neural networks are the hot thing and they've been the hot thing for a few years and machine learning and back then it was sort of in computer science circles at least it was like well that's a technology that's a fun toy to play with but this was a real thing they shipped it in a consumer product i don't remember anything like that uh around that time i remember um larry yeager the guy who developed the neural network system was telling me that um basically apple told him uh to go off and develop something new for five years and so

basically that's what he did and he used neural networks to create some life simulations and do some other stuff for Alan Kay. If you know Alan Kay, he was the Xerox PARC guy. A lot of the ideas came from Alan Kay. But anyway, so he developed these neural networks, and then eventually Apple came to him and said, okay, so what do you have to show for all this time that we gave you to do all this uh this computer science research and stuff like that so he said why not do some handwriting recognition and so that's how he got started on that um but yeah he's uh it was pretty cool to get to talk to him and just even though a lot of the stuff he said goes a little bit over my head not being a computer programmer um it's almost like he's talking about some sort of uh strange magic that he used to to

conjure up these letters in the handwriting recognition system in the movie he mentioned there were easter eggs and he was told to take them out and he just added another layer left a bin yeah did you know there were easter eggs before shooting the movie i knew there were easter eggs in the newton um for sure and even the very first newton um one of the fun things to do because we didn't have internet i would go to my grandma's house and look up some of these easter eggs and then i would try them on my newton and um so i knew that there were easter eggs all over the Newton. And I had no idea that they had made it into the Mac version.

So that was pretty cool when he revealed that, because I don't think he had told anybody about that publicly. So it's pretty cool that that's in the film, that he reveals that the Rosetta, which is a handwriting recognition system, the Rosetta system has these Easter eggs still built in after all these years. And the Rosetta system is used to recognize handwriting in Macs if you're using something like a tablet, a Wacom tablet. Right. They have this Inkwell preference pane that shows up when you plug in a tablet, and you can use it to do handwriting recognition. It's kind of like a product of its time though because it's it's like apple kind of put it in there and

then they forgot about it and i think it's in fact been deprecated for the in mac os mojave which is the latest one so it's probably going to disappear uh in the next couple of releases which is kind of sad. One of the things that struck me about the Newton, because I had forgotten about it over the years and rewatching the movie, I remembered a few things, but also learned a bunch of things. One of the things that struck me was how many bits of technology it kind of anticipated, but didn't quite get all the way there. Like it's based on an ARM processor, which now runs the world.

Right. The touchscreen, but as you say, it was pen-based. Some of the things surrounding how the whole OS was organized. Do you think if it hadn't been canceled, it would have morphed into something more akin to the iPad or the iPhone? Would that have been the iPhone? That's a very good question. I think that in some universes, yes, and in some universes, no. And the reason I say that is because the Newton was designed in such a way that there weren't

really any independent apps. In the iPad or iPhone, all the apps are kind of separate little silos and they have very tight security. They can't communicate unless you click allow. And the Newton wasn't like that. You could write an app that would poke into another app and use that data from that other app. And there was literally zero security. And so in today's world where security is very important, I don't know if

it would have survived. But then again, somebody might have come up with a way to add the security layer to it. And in that case, I think for sure it could have definitely survived. A lot of schools were starting to order them because they were cheaper than Apple's other laptops, especially the E-Mate, which was the Newton that had a keyboard. They were making their way into schools. I believe law enforcement and some other government-type things were starting to buy them because they were cheap computers they could put in cars and things like that. And people were using them to do inventory. And so they were starting to make a lot of headway into these vertical markets. I don't think that it was the original vision, which was to have these devices in everybody's pockets as kind of a personal assistant kind of communicator

type device. But I think they would have survived in that way. Okay, tell us about the movie. It's called Love Notes to Newton. How did it come about and why this movie? So I'm a member of a mailing list called newtontalk.net, which is kind of the central hub of the Newton community. I'm, I'm a Newton fan also. So I have, uh, I have a couple of them, uh, lying around and I'm also,

I was, I'm also very interested in documentary films and I've always wanted to make document, a documentary, like a feature length documentary. Um, and so in about 2009, I suggested on the list that I do a documentary. And at the time, I wasn't really in a place to pull it off. And crowdfunding wasn't quite, wasn't such a big thing like it is now. But in around 2016, 2017, I decided that the time was right, that I could probably pull it off. And so we ran this crowdfunding campaign. Me and another guy came on board. His name is Frank Orlando.

And he did all of the kind of artwork and graphic design and posters and things like that. He did all that for free. And we started this crowdfunding campaign and got the word out. And we originally wanted to raise about $17,000 because that would have been enough to cover travel and a small stipend for me to cover some of the editing and costs and stuff like that. And we ended up only raising about, I think about $7,000, which was still amazing because I had already decided that even if we raised about three thousand dollars i would make the movie on like a much smaller scale um but seven thousand dollars was enough money for to make the movie as long as i you know um saved money here and there

by you know in paris i camped uh in the city and i rode the bus from Germany to Paris and stuff like that just to save money. And so it was a really cool thing to see all the interest in the film. And a lot of the fans contributed. But a lot of people that I think just had an interest in kind of the story of it contributed too. And it was in the end a successful crowdfunding campaign, and I decided to make the movie. And the movie is partially about the people, and partially about the technology, and partially about the people who made the technology.

Right. Yeah. So there's kind of like a dual aspect to the film. And this was something I kind of wanted to do from the beginning because I figured if it works out that I can talk to all the people at Apple, then that would be fantastic. But probably I'm only going to get to talk to the fans. And so I kind of was bracing myself for failure that I wouldn't call it failure, but it would have been a much different movie if I had only talked to the fans or if I had only talked about the story of the Newton up until the cancellation. But this film, I really wanted to do both. And so we got to talk to some of the original engineers like Steve Capps, who worked on the project and actually is responsible for designing, I would say most of the interface. He was really, really actively kind of the one gluing the whole project together.

And we got to talk to the big fans who have, there guy named Paul Guillot who wrote a ton of software to keep Scully, who was the CEO of Apple at the time, and he agreed to do an interview. So I flew down to New York and went to his apartment overlooking Central Park, and we did an interview. It was fantastic. So I'm really happy with the fact that we got a lot of kind of the technical aspects in there and we got a lot of the um a lot of the people who are involved and who are still involved in there so um i was a little bit afraid that i was maybe covering too much ground and i think you could

probably make a whole film just about the story of Newton at Apple up till its cancellation. But as a Newton fan, it would have felt really wrong, I think, to leave out this amazing community aspect. How did the title come about? Okay. I mean, it's really apt. I mean, the movie really was love notes to Newton. Yeah. So, the central metaphor of the Newton is the notepad. So, the Newton is kind of like this super paper that can do pretty much anything. But when you turn on a Newton, you're not greeted by a grid of apps or by a desktop or something like that. It's a notepad, and you can write things on it,

like schedule appointment with Bob tomorrow at 3, and it will add those to your calendar. And you can write, email this to Sharon, and I'm trying to pick 80s appropriate names here, or 90s appropriate names here, and it'll do it for you, or send a fax or beam something to another newton um and so the notepad is just like it's the central metaphor here and um i suppose you could write love notes on it too if you wanted to and so the it's like an endless roll of paper

and so um i had originally titled the film love letter to Newton because that's kind of what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be a little bit nostalgic and I wanted it to be a little bit like that. But somebody from the list, Grant Hutchinson, who actually runs the list, suggested that it be called Love Notes, which was obviously the correct name because of the notepad metaphor that the Newton has. And so it became Love Notes to Newton. What do you hope people will take away from the film um i think the most important thing for me is uh that good technology is about people and i think that the newton was like that not only are there is there a really kind of a human aspect in the film that I really wanted

to have, but the device was really designed about what you wanted to do with it and what your daily schedule was and interactions with other people. I think that a lot of times, newer devices, because they're so advanced, they can be used more for content consumption. And a lot of people spend their time watching Netflix and on Facebook and stuff like that. And there's nothing wrong with these things. But the Newton was definitely a different kind of device in that it was focused on just the fact that you write on it to accomplish things is just, it's focused on creation, it's focused on communication in a way that I think that modern devices have taken kind of a different direction, which is fine. But part of the sadness, I think, for people who love the Newton is that computers didn't go in the direction that we kind of thought they would. I can see that. The Newton had an excellent input

interface, but its screen was 1990s technology. It wasn't beautiful. It wasn't as good as a TV. It wasn't color. It wasn't pretty. as a TV. All right. It wasn't color. It wasn't pretty. It was clearly a techie thing. But it had a really nice, not frictionless, but less friction interface than a keyboard. But all of our devices now are output devices.

They entertain us. They amuse us, they educate us. Outrageous. But unless you're making art on them, unless you're doing something with an app you know, making music, they can be input devices. They can be amazing. But if you have to categorize input devices versus output devices the newton was an input and my ipad is mostly output right are you guys familiar with the

remarkable tablet no so it's this e-ink kind of tablet it's it looks a little bit like an ipad but or sorry like an e-book. And it comes with a pen. And the idea is that it's just kind of like an endless notebook. It's a piece of paper. And you can, you can read PDFs on it, and you can mark it up, but you can't go on Facebook, and you can't do all these other things. And to me, kind of, that's, that's the thing that's the most similar to the Newton. It doesn't have a lot of the nice things that the Newton had, like handwriting recognition or some of the basic communications tools. But just the fact that there's a device out there that is kind of a different kind of computer. It's not kind of everything to everyone, which a lot of the iOS and Android devices are. It's kind of a

little bit more specific. And I think that there's probably still room in the world for devices that are like that. And it'll be kind of a niche, kind of like the Newton was. But I'd like to think that there's still room for a Newton of some kind. I agree. I wait for the day when tablets become so cheap that you have different ones for different purposes. Oh, wow. I mean, you think about Star Trek, and you hand somebody the document you want them to read, and it's on a flimsy... Yeah, they were always handing around different ones. And it wasn't that you probably couldn't have emailed them. Just, you know, sometimes it's easier to hand somebody stuff instead of telling them where on the server it is.

I, yeah, I can imagine wanting, I keep a Kindle in the bedroom because I don't want my iPad when I'm going to sleep. I want a book and I don't want my iPad when I'm going to sleep. I want a book, and I don't want it to be able to do anything else to me. No messages, no reminders. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that there's space. But back to the movie. What about for those who didn't love the Newton?

What do you think they'll get out of the movie well it's uh it's still a kind of a human story about um about working hard for something and then and then having it all come crash down and failing basically and then picking up the pieces and keeping on going and so i think that that uh there's a there's a couple scenes in the film which have kind of a really human dimension one is the scene with anna at her house um when she talks about her mother and the other scene is with steve caps when he talks about uh be the match and we kind of we left those scenes in the film um because i think that like i said before good technology is about people. And we wanted to get across that human dimension.

I think that that will make it accessible to people who just want to enjoy kind of a good story. I know there's a lot of technical stuff in there too, but I think that there's a human dimension to it also. I thought that was very effective. As not particularly a Newton lover, I did enjoy the movie quite a bit because the Apple people felt like they

created something to be proud of, but they also felt like they failed. And then there were all of these other people who loved their failure. And I want to go and watch the Apple people watch this movie. I want to know do they understand that what they built might have been a failure

to Apple? It wasn't a failure to a whole community who years, years, 20 years later is still in love. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine how much technology has that long of a shelf life. Well, let's see. It was canceled in 98.

So I guess we're at, uh, okay, good. It's a, it's, it's long enough. 20 years. When was the last time you used a Newton? Um, I, 20 years when was the last time you used a newton um i i'd say i pick it up and i use it every week because um it's true that it doesn't go online anymore and you can't really beam you know messages to your friends using newtons because nobody else has one and uh the screen is not bright like an ipad because back in the 90s it didn't really that didn't really exist on a handheld device but there's just something quiet it's like pulling out a notebook

and writing in it just kind of that feeling of doing something very personal and I just like that feeling and so I keep it beside my bed or in my office. And when I feel like it, I'll jot down some notes. Or I used to keep paper notebooks and journal a lot. And so that's something that has kind of transferred its life onto the Newton. And I do it a little bit on my iPad too, but I find that the iPad is so distracting with all its notifications and billion apps and all of these things so i that's

again that's why i think there's a place for these kinds of devices like the newton and i think a lot of people come back to it just to to relive kind of the feeling of having something so cool and so new when these things they really shouldn't have been possible and in fact they they kind of weren't you had you had to wait another 10 years before these, it started, people started to get it right. So. I want to ask you questions about making the movie,

which is a totally foreign thing to us. Okay. It's like making a podcast. Well, actually that's one of the first questions is when we do this podcast, we don't clip much. I mean, Chris does a great job making sure that listeners don't hear us cough and whatnot. But what you say is what's there. And yet there are also podcasts that will take 60 minutes of audio for 60 seconds of air time where do you fall in that how much video did you take right so i have hundreds of hours of

interviews and other material and i think um the challenge in knowing what to cut and what not to cut was kind of sifting through it. And I transcribed a lot of it and sorted through and figured out kind of what kind of story arc where it's a rise and release, and then there's a fall there, and then there's the rising action to where it finally gets good, and then there's another fall, and then there's a rising action kind of where the users pick it up and they start making it their own. And so I kind of, anything that fit into that arc, I kept. And anything else, I had to kind of, I had to regretfully cut it.

And I didn't totally succeed. There's some stuff in there that I left in just because I thought it was amazing. But at the same time, I guess having kind of done my research and having a preconceived idea really helped me um to cut out a lot of the stuff because if someone else had made this film they probably could have made a completely different movie um it would have had a lot of the same elements but it made it might have had a different message and so i think kind of having that central idea which i think comes from having used the newton and being a part of the. I think that really influenced how I put it together. So if,

if I were just coming at it as an outsider, I probably would have focused more effort onto the time at Apple and kind of the office drama and Steve jobs coming back and stuff like that. But I didn't want to get too embroiled in Steve jobs because it's not really his story. He kind of, he's, he's kind of a blip, um, you know, uh, nothing against Steve Jaws, but he's, he's not,

he's the catalyst for it becoming a different story, but it's not really about him. So. Yeah. I was going to say could easily, he was such a powerful figure. And that was such a, those five years or so between 93 and 98 were such a kind of a turning point for that company from going out of business to right it was a seeds of becoming the largest company in the world yeah yeah until 98 and then he turned it around for sure you could easily see this becoming him taking over the story, which didn't happen. And I was happy to see that because it was, okay, this is, he's to somebody about the Newton back at that time.

But yeah, he's not a central figure, but he is an important part of the story. You had this story planned out before you did this. I'm sorry, it's going back to podcasting. I kind of plan out ahead of time, but really it never goes according to plan. I only do the plan because it's a good exercise. I am surprised you had a plan. Yeah, I think the reason for that is because I've been so immersed in the Newton Talk mailing list, and there's actually a book called Defying Gravity, which details some of the later history of the Newtons' development.

And so just the fact that I had done my homework, I think, a lot of my interviews, I kind of had an idea of where they were going to go. And there were a lot of people who surprised me, for sure. And I think most of those surprises made it into the film. But kind of the general story i i was already very comfortable with and i know that i'm supposed to be kind of like an open book as an interviewer and just go where the story leads but um in my case i kind of i had a good idea about where the story was going to go what did what really surprised me was um all the people who were willing to talk um especially john scully who turns out is just the nicest guy.

And Steve Capps. And there's Sandy Bennett, who was running Newton at the time that Steve Jobs came back. And just some of these people who, you know, they don't have to sit down and talk with a documentary filmmaker from Canada. But they were really nice and they really took the time to do it. And I think that was the most surprising thing for me was that I was actually able to achieve kind of a good portion of what I wanted to achieve. And so for me, as a filmmaker filmmaker that's just very exciting that um that i started in that direction and i was actually able to make it there so that is very cool to have achieved that i mean it seems like a movie that is organic and came about interviews and i'm

i'm just pleased to see christopher's looking at me like i'm insane i'm just trying to see where you're headed how do you how do you make it interesting when it's like a yeah as a documentary how do you make a documentary interest that's a very good question. And I struggle with that a lot. I think what I decided in the end was that I'm going to make the movie that I want to make. And hopefully I have somewhat good taste, and some people who are like me will probably enjoy this movie also. So, it doesn't sound very clever, but that was kind of the direction I went. I think all of us have kind of an idea of what a good movie is because we've

seen so many. And so if you are able to tell the story to the best of your ability, I think you can make a film. I think that one thing you have to be willing to do is to cut out a lot of stuff that is good stuff, but it just doesn't fit with your story also. Or it doesn't fit with the stuff that the other interviewees said. So, yeah. I've kind of forgotten what the question was, but I hope that I got the answer in there somewhere. I think so. It was about how to make interesting documentaries. Right, yeah.

And one of the things you did well was balance the amount of technology an audience can stand in these few minutes. I can stand a lot. Well, yeah. But you have to switch back and forth between tech and people in order to keep it engaging. And everybody has a different line of how much tech they can stand versus how much interpersonal reactions they can stand.

I know for a fact that I lost some people, my own sister and mother included. But then there's other people who kind of have a little bit of a grasp on some of these things and that who really loved it. So it is a bit of a niche kind of thing. And I don't think there's any getting away from that. So in the end, I just had to do the kind of movie that I thought would be a good movie. Did you know there would be drama because of the Newton email list or is there always drama to be found when you're making a movie? Hmm. I think a little bit of both. I think that, um, through my research,

I knew that, um, Sandy Bennett was going to be, he was, he was really upset about the cancellation of Newton. He was running Newton when it was canceled. He's the one who had to talk to Steve Jobs. And he told me some stories, which I didn't put in the film because they were a little bit too negative, and I didn't want to leave people with that bad taste in their mouth. But coming back to your question, which I've forgotten, what was it again? Is there always drama to be found? Oh is that just the human condition yeah i think so i think so because

i think you could make um there's a there's a film on netflix about the guys who founded compact and um if you were around in the 90s i think i don't know about youpaq was pretty much the boringest computer company, very generic. But yeah, exactly. But they made this fascinating documentary, the guys who made it. I can't remember who they are, about Compaq and the guys who started it. So I think that there's, like you said, there's this human drama that can be found anywhere. You just have to start digging and you have to find the story. I'm sure there's some places where there's this human drama that can be found anywhere you just have to you have to start digging and you have to find the story i'm sure there's some places where there's no story but

you know i have yet to discover those i have a friend who is thinking about making a tech related uh documentary and one of the parts that's been a problem is shooting older people talking about tech without it just being a head talking. How do you shoot people so that they look more human? And how do you talk about tech without them becoming a lecture yeah without it becoming a lecture exactly um i think for for one thing you all you obviously have to make it about people and um you have to talk a little bit about the tech but it has to kind of fit into the story and if it doesn't fit into the story then you have to really kind of limit it um but then again i think that to make a to make that kind of stuff interesting uh from a cinematic point of view one thing we did and i know it's not talking directly about tech was

i went with a guy named adam tau who was the president of the newton developers association we actually went on to the apple campus and we walked around with uh and i shot him with my iphone and he was wearing a microphone and we just got kind of mobile like that and just made um kind of made a story out of it just him walking around the apple campus telling us about this newton protest that they had and so i think that um you you can talk about tech if it's if, but you have to realize that to some people, this is just going to be talking about magic and they won't understand a thing. So you have to have these other moments, too, where you kind of, oh, yeah, this is a really hard question. But I think that at one point in the film, in my film, Larry Yeager, the guy who did the Rosetta handwriting recognizer, he's just talking about how it works. And I just let him talk. And I don't, I just leave just sounds like magic. I think I mentioned that before. And I'm not sure if that was the right decision or not, but you kind of have to go with your gut. If you think it's boring, then you kind of have to cut it. And maybe you can mention it briefly, but there's always a balance when you make a film. You're making it for yourself, but you also want other people to watch it. So, oh, that's a very tough question. I think for stuff like that, that specific example, there was enough level of detail for someone who didn't really understand it

to say, okay, they did something new and that's amazing. And there was enough kind of that people who did know what he was talking about could unpack it and say, oh, he did that? I mean, he doesn't need to describe the whole thing to me, but I know what that means. And I was able to say to myself, oh, that was an amazing thing to pull off in 1993 or whatever. Right. Without going into, okay, well, here's the foundations of neural networks. We're going to take a detour so that everybody understands. So I think striking that balance was really good.

At the same time, there's no way to please everybody. So you kind of have to, you might lose some people on a film that's as specific as this. The international aspect was neat uh did you take your video shooting rig around the world did you travel a lot what kind of gear did you need in order to shoot this movie although now you've admitted you did some of it on your iphone which i think is awesome yeah um some of the interviews we i hired out um it wasn't it wasn't uh in the budget for me to go to New Zealand, for example. And so I hired those out.

A couple of places in the States when I ran out of time and money, I hired out. But for most of the interviews, I was actually there. So some of the most interesting ones I did were in Europe. I flew to Dusseldorf in Germany and, um, I just had, uh, one backpack, which I had bought specifically for that trip. It was just a giant, uh, camera backpack. And I had all of my, um, a change of clothes in there and a couple of changes of underwear and my camera and my tripod and memory cards in my my MacBook. And that was pretty much it. I had a camera stabilizer for my iPhone. And I had planned on camping. And when I got to Europe, it was much

colder than I thought it would be. So the guy I went there to interview, one of the guys I went to interview, he kindly let me stay in his house and they were very nice. And I got to ride the Autobahn at 200 kilometers an hour, whatever that is in miles per hour. I don't know. Uh, and, uh, just meet all of these crazy Newton people who I have, uh, who I've met through the list, the list kind of unofficially. But, um, i think a lot of the people who saw the film who were part of this community one of the things that i keep getting thanks thank yous for is that i've introduced them face to face to a lot of these um these newton people who are kind of legendary in this tiny community but um really once you get out of the community, obviously nobody cares. But it's just kind of a special thing to receive that kind of feedback.

But anyway, so yeah, I took the night bus to Paris, from Dusseldorf to Paris, which you should never do. It was a horrible, scary experience. And then I camped in Paris, and I did interviews every day until I had to fly back. And so it was just like, it was guerrilla filmmaking. If you know, part of the excitement for me about doing weddings or doing any kind of filmmaking is just showing up and having circumstances that are just not ideal and then making something that looks professional. And so that's fun to do in weddings. And I tried to follow the same philosophy when shooting this film,

where I did as much planning as I could, but really I had no idea what I was going to discover or who I was going to meet up with, what kind of person they would be. And it was just really a lot of fun to have kind of the unpredictability of that and just have a few items, my camera and stuff like that, and to use natural light. So that was part of the fun of it. And I'm just really thankful that I got to do that. But at the time, it was very stressful, as you might imagine. Yeah, you don't usually have to camp when you do weddings.

I imagine. No, I've, I've done it, but, uh, you know, and how much of the videos were live or planned?

I mean, you, you talk about doing research to make sure you, you can know what to ask, which I totally understand. But did you have people tell the same story three times and try to get the best one? Or did you ask them to enter the room again, but this time without knocking over the cup of coffee? Oh, no, actually.

That never occurred to me that I could do that. That's why there's all those people spilling coffee in the film. No, actually, you know what? The reason I think that I didn't do that was that I find the first time you do something, there's kind of an energy to it that sometimes you don't get back on the second or third try. And, um, I, I also kind of my flaw,

it worked against my philosophy that I had said at the beginning for this project was that I was going to shoot it kind of like a wedding. You can't ask the bride to walk down the aisle again. Um, and so I kind of wanted to use that same philosophy when I was shooting because otherwise I would never have got this film done. It would have taken three times as long. Another example, I went to see John Scully and he told me as soon as I walked in the door, he says, we have a hard stop in an hour.

And so I set up my camera. We didn't set up any lighting because it would have taken extra time. We used the natural light and it turned out great. And I had my questions prepared. And usually what I try to do is I read over my questions enough times that I don't have to break eye contact to look at the notes. And so I think that that's very important. Like you guys, probably when you call your interviewees for your podcast you don't want to have like a pre-scripted thing necessarily you want to have a spontaneous discussion but

I find that that really only happens if you're really prepared and you of course you're looking for surprises when you're interviewing the person but you also want to kind of have a pretty strong idea about what is going to be interesting and what's not going to be interesting with john skelly i asked him a few questions about his childhood and how he got to where he is now because i find that also that's important to provide a little bit of context um and to get people kind of loosened up and um and interested in talking with you that's very surprising he was only there for an hour he was in a number of scenes so another thing about uh john scully and also there's another guy named

james joaquin um they're both marketing guys and so pretty much every word out of their mouth is precise and it's gold and it's just a perfect soundbite. So interviewing those guys was very, I don't want to say easy, but it was pretty easy. Yes, I totally understand. Some people are. And talking about their childhood makes a lot of sense. And now you have discovered the real reason behind lightning round. You ask people completely random questions and then they are so glad when you stop. Oh yeah, I'm so glad. No kidding. So, Andre, how well do you know him? Well, I've only met him once actually, but it's really funny when you have something in common to talk about like that, whenever you meet somebody and it's like, I don't know, apparently Canadians are famous for talking about the weather.

I don't know what it's like down there, but when you meet someone new in Canada and you probably don't have anything in common with them, especially here in Montreal, it's a very multicultural city. But what you do is you just start talking about the weather and see what happens. And so I feel like that kind of unites us. And it's the same thing with the Newton community. Once you meet somebody, you just start talking about your Newton and you show them kind of what you've done with it, what apps you have. You talk a little bit about the philosophy. And before you know it, you guys are just best friends. And so I felt that way with pretty much everybody I talked to, was that as soon as we started talking about Newton stuff,

that something just clicked. And I feel like I've known Andre and other people for ages. What do you think will happen next with the film? Hmm. So we're on Vimeo on demand right now. And you can purchase it on the website at nudefilm.com. But what we want to do is to finally get it onto iTunes. And I think that's the next big hurdle. Because once it's on iTunes, more people will find it. And I think the more people will find it, the more people will kind of share it. And we don't have really any marketing budget. So we did, we do a little social media runs once in a while,

but we can't compete for eyeballs the way that's like Netflix or something like that can. So what has been happening is that it's a slow kind of trickle of viewers. So even though we don't have a ton of viewers all the time, we are going to have probably consistent viewership over the next five or ten years, which is what I think will happen. So unless we get on Netflix or something like that. So if you go on Netflix and you click, uh, the content, uh, the request form, you can, you can always help us out. Are you going to do another film? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. This was a great experience. Never again. Yeah. Well, if you asked me six months ago, I don't know. I might have had a different answer after the whole experience of it.

But looking backwards, it's kind of like having a kid. You think it's the worst experience of your life when they're one year old and you swear you'll never have another one. And then after a couple of years, you start to get stupid and you want another one and so that's what's like having a film i think is that um all of the the hard stuff you went through to make the film disappears and you forget how you were pulling your hair out during editing and and then you want another baby so do you have any that makes any sense it It does. Do you know what the next topic is going to be? Well, I'm open to suggestions if you guys have any ideas.

Wow. Wow. No, I mean, there are... I mean, it depends if you want to stay in the same realm of technology. Communities around technology. There's a lot of stuff to do there. I mean, it depends if you want to stay in the same realm of... Technology. Communities, communities around technology. There's a lot of stuff to do there.

I think that there's more to do there for sure. I've met a lot of people through this film who also collect Macs and they have rooms full of Macintosh computers. And I think there might be a story there. I haven't figured out what it is yet. Chris is looking at his. No, I think there might be a story there. I haven't figured out what it is yet. Chris is looking at his. I'm looking at my Apple two plus. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm halfway there. I have a few old machines too, but, um,

I think there might be a story there, but I'm open to any kinds of, uh, any kind of kind of human idea. Um, I love technology. So if it had to do with technology, that would be great, too. Yeah, some of those things are time-limited, too, because the people who are involved are getting older, depending on what era of thing. That's a very good point. There's a guy named David Grealish who helped me a lot to get in contact with John Scully because he had interviewed him ages ago for his podcast and he has just started a documentary about the Apple Lisa. I think that that's a very timely topic too now that

Lisa Brennan Jobs, Steve Jobs' daughter has just released a book. I'm hopeful that that will go somewhere. That's not my project specifically, but I think that there's definitely a story there if it's possible for him to tell it, which I really hope it is. Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm still, so many things that you could, I mean, it could be hardware. It could even be software. Some of these games we grew up with, the making of Turtle. Ultima. I mean, you need to do a documentary about Ultima. What was the one you were telling me about where the third one was super violent and the fourth one had no violence? It had violence, but the message was about becoming a good person.

It was the Ultima series. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think there are so many options here. What was the biggest surprise? I mean, you had some notion going into it. Was there anything that surprised you that people said? Any stories that you were just like, wow, I never heard that? Hmm.

I think that one surprise for me was when I walked into, in the film, there's a woman named Anna Cipollone. And her mother had passed away, and her mother had been the big Newton user in the family. And I went to visit them at their house in Toronto, and she brought me into her kitchen where she had laid out her mother's collection. And there were about 30 e-mates, which is the Newton that had a keyboard, on her kitchen table. And she said, there's two more boxes. And that really surprised me. There was so much love for this machine that she was collecting them and she was giving them to kids in her classroom. And I think, yeah, that surprised me, I think.

All right. Well, I guess one last question about, for my friend who's making tech movie, what advice do you have? Don't do it. I already suggested they make a tech podcast instead, but I'm biased. I think if there's any advice, I would say to, there are a few guiding principles that I did. And one of them was to just to do it, to complete it at any cost. So what I kind of meant by that was if you don't have ideal circumstances or you don't have the proper lighting or you don't have the best camera, you just got to somehow make it work because unless you have a ton of money, then you have to just spend a lot of time. And so I would say just go for it and just start,

and it'll all come together as you keep working on it. How did you figure out you were done recording? And then how did you figure out you were done editing? Oh, I ran out of money. I imagine you did that long before you started. Yes, that's true. It's true. I put in quite a lot of my own money too, into this film, but, um, how did I know? Um, I don't, I don't think it is finished. I think that, um, I don't know who it was that said that you don't,

you don't finish a film. You just abandon it. I think that I could have talked to some other people, especially at Apple. There's people who are still working there who I was not allowed to talk to, like Michael Chow, who was very important in the development of kind of the smaller Newton, which was the Newton that we came to know of. Because originally the Newton was a tablet, kind of like the iPhone was originally a tablet project. It was a larger screen device. But I think that you could go a lot further back into kind of the history. And Newton was a research project that was really far advanced for its time. And I think I got to talk to some of those people, but I think the film was too short and it was, the format was too short to go into some of that really interesting history there.

And you could make a whole other film just about the stuff that went on at Apple. And I hope that somebody will do that someday. Going back to the question, how do you finish something of this scale? Did you have a deadline? Did you have a, I must be done? Yes, we did have a deadline. We had a deadline and we passed the deadline and the editing was not done. So I think that's the way it goes with any kind of crowdfunding project, though.

I love deadlines. I love the sound, the whooshing sound they make as they go by. Yeah, exactly. the whooshing sound they make as they go by yeah exactly um we we came we i came to a point in the film where it was i had cut out a lot of stuff and i had made the story as tight as i thought it should be and to i i i knew that i could cut more and i could make it a little more streamlined but i didn't want to anymore i was I was happy with the film as it was. And I think at that point, then I realized that I was done the film. Was it just one morning you woke up and you said, yeah, okay.

Yeah. Because I think what happens is when you take a break for a couple of weeks and then you come back to it and you watch it through and if you enjoy watching it from start to finish then i think it feels like you're done and then you you but at that point you're ready to share it with other people so i reached that point where i enjoyed watching my own film and i think that was significant. Definitely. Well, I think we've kept you for long enough. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? The film, kind of the whole financial purpose of the film was to raise money for this organization called Be The Match, bethematch.org.

And what they do is they do bone marrow transplants uh life-saving bone marrow transplants and the reason we chose that charity was because um steve caps who is in the film um his daughter required one of these transplants and uh just before we talked to him his daughter had received it and it was just um uh it's a it's a really easy thing to do. You take a cheek swab and you send it in. You contact them, they send you a kit, and basically you probably never get called, but if they do call you, then you could save somebody's life with one of these donations.

So all the money is going to them, and I just want to say one more time that good technology is about people and so i hope that even through kind of uh the be the match.org connection that we're that that's what we're about so our guest has been noah leon cinematographer and producer owner of moose fuel media and the creator of Love Notes to Newton, a movie you can buy or rent on newtfilm.com He gave us a discount code

embedded.fm and you get 25% off. It's not expensive and it was nice to see. It was really nice to see. Thank you for the movie and thank you for being with us, Noah. It's my pleasure, guys. Thank you.

Thank you to Andrej Csicak from the Great White North for introducing us to Noah and for playing what is clearly a starring role in the movie. He's the first person you see. Thank you to our Patreon Slack members for a few of these questions and of course thank you for listening oh wait i forgot in there to talk to say thank you to christopher how could i that's fine uh you can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm there will be a number of links including to the movie and to some of the other things we've mentioned here, like the newtontalk.net mail group. If you're out there and you have a Newton, you need to know these people.

And now a quote to leave you with. This one from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them.

At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.