Newton Philosophy and the eternal speed bump

Okay, the title of this post is kind of strange. Here's where it started. Last week was a whirlwind of travel and meetings. At one point, I was able to show a colleague my work with BluePrint2 and how I had entered each step of our masters program final project into my 2100. The first response was "neat." The second response was "can you send that file to me?" There was the crux of the problem. I can't. My colleague doesn't have a Newton. BluePrint2 doesn't load up to my PC. It's stuck on my machine.

This got me thinking in two directions. First, and practically, I have never been able to get my 2100 to work with my PC and the Newton Connection Utilities (NCU). I have tried everything you're supposed to do according to the Wikki and the NewtonTalk listserv. Alas, no luck. (Mind you, XPort works just fine. It just doesn't transfer BluePrint2 files.) I wonder - was there ever an export function for this software? Was there even a manual beyond the quick start guide? Questions for the listserv I suppose.

The second direction was more philosophical. The Newton came out long before the Palm. The Palm was designed to be an adjunct to the PC - carry your contacts & schedule in your shirt pocket. Sync your Palm daily (or more often) to capture any changes on either platform. Of course Palms (and their brethren - like my Clie) have evolved a great deal, but the philosophy is the same. A Palm is an extension of the desktop and is (should be) dependent on it for regular "sync-ing". Just how far I have bought into that philosophy was an eye-opener to me.

The Newton was designed as a stand-alone. When I was an active user of my 120 (back in 1996), I only ever used my PC connection to install pkg files and do the occasional memory backup. I operated with the Newton independently of my PC and never thought twice about the fact that I could have conceivably lost every contact, every appointment etc etc if the system failed. (I was in full-time clinical practice then, and the loss of that kind of data would have been a disaster.) So here's the rub: I have not yet shaken the Palm mentality - I am "afeard" of letting go and trusting my Newton in a 'PC independent' manner once again. The key to this fear is not having successfully run NCU, even though a) I have two memory cards in the 2100, a 4mb and 20 mb, on which I do a backup regularly; and b)a backup of Newton OS material on my PC would be about useless unless I had another Newton (with NOS 2.1, not 2.0 like my old 120) sitting around in case of emergency.