How to tweet from a Newton

The 20th anniversary of the Newton inspired me to pull out and dust off my old MessagePad 2100. I naturally tried to tweet from it.

This proved problematic thanks to https and oAuth — there was no way to get to mobile.twitter.com or authenticate with text-based sites like kindletwit.com.

Needless to say, I was not going to let this stop me. So here’s how to tweet from a Newton:

1) enable Internet Sharing on your Mac’s ethernet port
2) enable telnetd in launchctl
3) connect the PCMCIA Ethernet card (Farallon Networks!) to the Mac and enable DCHP in the Newton’s Internet Setup
4) use PT100 to telnet to 192.168.2.1 to get to the Mac OS X command line
5) ssh from the Mac to a unix host that has Lynx installed
6) lynx to m.twitter.com
7) tweet!

Added bonus — Newton panorama:

Additional added bonus: what this blog would have looked like in 1997:

Extra additional added bonus: Lynx in Terminal handles Twitter’s mobile site pretty nicely:

Also, I miss Farallon Networks.

I tried to get the Newton to load my Burrito Railgun launch GIF, but it only has 4MB of onboard memory and the GIF is 5MB so that’s not happening. Better luck with the BRG GIF schematic.

Back when bytes were big: