How Evernote Is Related To Apple's Newton

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on July 01

Last night as I was closing today’s story about the application Evernote, I learned an interesting bit of trivia, that Newton fans will find interesting.

Evernote founder Stepan Pachikov was a co-founder of ParaGraph, a Russian concern that in 1993 supplied the CalliGrapher handwriting recognition engine to Apple’s Newton line of PDAs. Retired in 1998 not long after Steve Jobs took over as CEO from Gil Amelio, the Newton is fondly remembered by enthusiasts, but more widely remembered for being lampooned by cartoonist Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury, mainly because its text recognition abilities weren’t quite ready for prime time.

As anyone who’s used it can tell you, one of Evernote’s best features is its ability to quickly recognize text in photos, and even in images of handwritten notes on paper or white boards. I asked CEO Phil Libin if there were any connection between the two. There is, absolutely, he said. Some of the people who worked on the original CalliGraphy engine are working on Evernote’s text-recognition capabilities now, and so the two products are very much related, he says. So if you’re an Evernote user now, and were a Newton user at any time in the past, you can appreciate the connection.

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