No Doonesbury?

I was a little worried when I found that the egg freckles Easter egg had been dropped from the Newton 2.1 OS on the Newton MP 2000; this is the one that brings up a Doonesbury carton if you use Assist on an OS 2.0 Newton. However, there are a couple of interesting new Easter eggs in 2.1.

My favourites are the two card games hidden in the ROM. Both are Poker variants, and you have to figure out the rules by playing them. There is a downloadable package which will call them up for you, but it is more interesting to use the Newton Works spreadsheet to run them, as they are very simple OS calls.

Here's how:

Create a new spreadsheet in Works. In one cell, enter =buildContext(@830):open(), and in another =buildContext(@831):open(). You can do this without the calls being executed. To bring up one of the games, select either of the cells, and click on the tick mark on the entry line at the bottom of the display.

In older Newtons, you could get a list of Newton team developers by entering about Newton? in the Assist box. This now returns What about Newton?, followed by (of course) a list of names.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: July 30, 1997