NEnetworked·Mar 24, 2023Submission
Dash Board for Newton OS: A Comic Tragedy in Nine Acts (2013)
2 points · Open discussionmasonmark
Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
OPEN SOURCE2015–2023
masonmark / Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
Dash Board was a popular interface enhancement for Newton OS 2.1 in the late 1990s.
4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
89GitHub stars
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What it is
Dash Board was a popular interface enhancement for Newton OS 2.1 in the late 1990s.
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Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-02-11 02:01:42 UTC to 2023-03-24 08:20:04 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesFor me, it was the second application I ever released, when I was a student at university and still didn't really know how to program properly.
The application was Dash Board[1] for Newton OS, and it only ran on the final generation of Newton hardware (created by Apple, but spun out as a separate company in its final days, before being killed by Steve Jobs shortly after his return).
It "only" sold a few thousand copies. (But it was during the warez heyday, and I am pretty sure there were also tens of thousands of bootleg copies being used, thanks to the registration code generator by "DocNZ" that was widely shared on Hotline back then.)
But that was really pretty great, since the final MP2000/2100 generation of hardware it required was thought to have only sold about 200,000 devices in total.
I have since had a fairly normal software engi
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neer career, and have worked on apps that shipped far more copies, and today I work on customer facing web applications and API SDKs that have more users, and arguably do stuff that is more "important" (e.g. help companies manage large fleets of machines/robots/IoT stuff) than what Dash Board did — which was basically just improve the user interface of the Newton.
But it's 100% clear to me that the magnitude of user impact of Dash Board was much higher than any other thing I've built. People really loved it — I know because hundreds of them actually wrote to us to let us know. (LOL I mean wrote to me "me" — old habits of pretending the company wasn't just one student in his tiny apartment die hard).
Of course, I made more money later, and worked on things that touched a much larger number of people's lives. But "impact" has both X and Y axes. It was the depth of the users' fondness for Dash Board that makes it eclipse everything since. I don't think there are that many chances to just go for "user delight" as the number one metric.
For me, developer satisfaction is a function of that user delight more than anything else.
[1]: http://www.fivespeedsoftware.com/dashboard
[2]: 15 years later, I open-sourced the code and gave it a proper retrospective: https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
Dash Board for Newton OS: a Comic Tragedy in Nine Acts
21 points · Open discussionI belatedly open-sourced Dash Board for Newton, my popular 1997 UI enhancement app:
https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
The README there also walks through the process of getting all the emulators and whatnot running on a modern machine so that you can build it (or other Newton software).
Because Newton software source code was composed of many small NewtonScript files in a proprietary binary format (with resource forks!), I also exported t he source code into a text format that can be read more easily:
https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS/blob/m...
In A Guide to the Apple Newton