NewtonScript has a date handling bug that will kick in around 7 PM on January 5, 2010. The usual geniuses are investigating how to fix this, but the clock is ticking.
Any fix applied at the user level after the system has booted has a risk of not getting applied to some critical underlying function which has already been loaded. It’s likely that a system level patch is required.
However.
John Arkley, an ex-Newton team engineer, stated the following in a post from 1999:
A Newton System Update or “system patch” is a complex intermixed collection of MMU tables, 40-70 assembler “fixes” all packed together in a collection of ordered 4K RAM pages. Building and testing a System Update is complex and expensive process and no single engineer could do it. The Newton OS only supports ONE system patch, so ALL the existing “fixes” and any new ones have to be combined together to combined to create the “next” System Update. Newton OS is unusual in this [regard]; [it’s] like only allowing ONE “init” in the MacOS instead of a whole folder full of “Extensions”. […] Apple is the only one who has the tools to build a new System Update and all the engineers who know how to do it don’t work for Apple any more […]
And that was 10 years ago. It sounds a bit grim.
Assuming the Newton community survives that, we’ll have a problem again with the Newton’s underlying C++ libraries in 2040.
