WWW/Newton: Mobile Computing for the Internet

In this paper, we motivate the importance of mobile access to global information systems and present WWW/Newton, a WWW frontend for Apple's Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), the Newton. An emphasis is put on impacts of the PDA technology and Iimited net­work bandwidth on the software architecture of WWW/Newton. On the other hand, we will discuss resuIting requirements for next-generation WWW protocols and servers which can be easily generaIized to other global information systems. The work presented was carried out in the context of a larger project which investigates the mutual impacts of mobile computing technology and distributed appIications. WWW/Newton software has been successfuIly pre­sented on several international exhibitions and has received vital interest from the network community.