First Looks: A Review of “Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton”

We live in a world where high technology is often granted star-like attention and amazement. However, behind each great innovation lies an even more interesting tale of the people and events leading to its introduction. In the book “Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton,” photographer Doug Menuez and author Markos Kounalakis give us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the toil and turmoil in creating a new breed of product—Silicon Valley style.

The book, produced by Beyond Words Publishing, uses a highly visual style with the well-written, entertaining text nicely complementing the hundreds of photographs. In fact, “Defying Gravity” is radically different from the customary business biography both in style and content, with the layout seemingly drawing its spirit from the Marshall McLuhan-inspired Wired magazine.

The book follows the course of the Newton’s development, tracing its lineage back to the early days where a near-renegade group of engineers cordoned themselves off in a converted warehouse on Bubb Road in Cupertino—far enough from the main Apple campus to illicit memories of an earlier pirate group which developed the “insanely great” Macintosh.

From here we follow the Newton inception from a proposed $8000, dual-processor, super pen tablet computer to the device we’ve all come to know—the sub $1000 handheld. This much debated transition apparently gained the upper hand when manager Michael Tchao was able to cleverly paint a mental picture for John Sculley, comparing the smaller Newton to the conceptual elements of Sculley’s dreamed Knowledge Navigator. After some arm twisting, all that was left was to actually build and sell the device.

Of course, nothing of this magnitude is ever simple. This all came to a point when, during the Newton’s formal introduction at the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show, Michael Tchao flipped the switch in front of hundreds of people to have absolutely nothing happen.

In the course of reading about the Newton’s creation, we become acquainted with several legendary personal computing figures, including Jean-Louis Gassee, Steve Sakoman, Steve Capps, Larry Tesler, Marc Porat, and others. We also get insight into the several midstream course changes to which the developers were force to adapt, such as the shift in languages from Ralph to Dylan to C, and the shift from the AT&T Hobbit chip to the ARM processor.

The story of the Newton is also not without its tragedy as engineer Ko Isono took his own life after collapsing from the immense personal energy costs. The Newton would continue on suffering through several other setbacks and failures before attaining its deserved spotlight at the Boston MacWorld in August 1992. And the rest is living history.