Ewan's been looking back to the Apple Newton and forward to Thursday's Apple tablet launch, using these as markers to chart the growth of information sharing in the wider smartphone world. Soup was the past, APIs are the future, he reckons!

"With all this talk about cloud computing and data in the cloud, I find it interesting that one of the most advanced implementations of data handling seen on a mobile device seems to have been left as a footnote in a technological dead end (or at least it will be a dead end until a certain event this Wednesday...) Apple's Newton Messaging Pad, launched to the public in 1993, dispensed with a traditional file system and went with a massive bundle of flat file databases to store information."

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