MYSTERIOUS BEGINNINGS

The Newton's origins go back to 1987, when Apple engineer Steve Sackoman nearly left the Cupertino company to work on his vision of computing's future: an intelligent, go-anywhere device with a myriad of built-in communications.

To keep Sackoman at Apple, his boss became his patron. Jean-Louis Gassee, the head of research and development, secured a highly unusual deal for Sackoman and his handpicked team of engineers.

They would work unfettered by budgets, bureaucracy and-best of all-any taint of marketing, by themselves in a converted warehouse away from Apples' main campus and off-limits to the rest of the company. The deal attracted some of Apples' bet minds, like software designer Steve Capps and hardware guru Michael Culbert.

In such an environment, eclectic ideas flourished and Newton began to take shape as the ultimate engineer's dream, a computing Porsche bristling with speed and power. It also sported a Porsche price tag: the machine was designed in late 1989 would have cost buyers some $8,000.

By 1990, though, Gassee and Sackoman were gone, and Apple's top brass, in the person of chief executive John Sculley, took a much keener interest in the expensive project. Sculley told his new head of advanced technology, engineer Larry Tesler, to salvage what he could and scrap the rest. The group was in upheaval: The enemy, corporate Apple, had come to the warehouse door.

THE TOOL

Tesler, after scrutinizing three years' work, decided to buck the brass: He recommended Sculley keep the project going and redirect it. Tesler told the growing Newton team to figure out how to make the project far cheaper-and make a formal presentation to top management to sell the project.

They did, and Newton got the green light to continue. The project also got its first infusion of the dread "marketing" influence in the person of Michael Tchao, an energetic young veteran of Apple's ill-fated Macintosh Portable. Working on the Newton project now was reminiscent of another groundbreaking Apple project: the Macintosh personal computer. Like the Macintosh's developers, Newton's programmers and engineers were a small team driven to creating something new, something that would define their company and industry for years to come. They were fanatics, and like most fanatics, they devoted almost all their energy to the project.

The group set up a super-secret war room called the Brain Tank, open 24 hours a day, lined with white boards for people to sketch their ideas. The project team worked such weird hours that workers scheduled a time each week for children to visit their near-absentee parents at work.

To work off stream, the team's technical wizards opted for hard-driving basketball games in which "no injuries" was the only rule. On the road for public demonstrations, they turned hotel rooms into toy-filled programming suites to makes the stress.

THE STRESS

As the promised time for Newton's delivery drew closer, work on the project became more frenzied. Things were thrown into near panic when the team settled on building a pocketsize unit first, abandoning much of its work on a larger tablet-size Newton. That meant throwing away much of the software that had been developed over five years and starting with a new language.

Adding to the pressure was a delivery schedule that would have been tough to meet even with the old software. With a huge revision, and hardware plagued by overheating and 10 minutes of battery life, the project's pace became grueling.

Capps, to escape daily jaunts to the office and spend some time with his new wife, wired his home to support an advanced computer network and put key programmers up in his guest quarters. People began working nearly around the clock, catching sleep when they could, often on the floor of their offices at Apples' new R&D Center.

Just before Christmans1992, the pressure proved to be too much for one Newton programmer, Kay Isono. Like Capps, he had married only a few months before while in the throes of the revamped project, which kept him apart from his bride. A Japanese native who had causally remarked to a colleague that he liked the fact that in the United States people could buy guns, Isono took his own life.

The already planned Christmas party was the Newton team's lowest point. But people got back to work, desperately trying to meet slipping deadlines.

THE DEALS

What sets the Newton apart from everything that's gone before it at Apple is that the money isn't in the hardware that took six years to develop. It is in licensing the company's latest jewel to others, cutting deals with Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers, U.S. communications companies, German telecommunications giants and a host of others. It broke the pattern at Apple, dating back to the Macintosh in 1984, that dictated that the company's technology was only truly valuable if it belonged only to Apple alone.

The new approach took Sculley, Tchao and other key Newton team members around the world, to sell potential partners on the "new" Apple. The task was a s grueling as making the technology work: it went against years of history and into the face of an industry that wasn't convinced Sculley's and Apple's vision of the future was real.

Underscoring the importance of deals, Sculley negotiated one in a back room of Boston's Symphony Hall just hours before he strolled onstage to introduce the fruits of six years' labor: the first Newton.