John Venzon, curator of the Newton Museum is shutting down the website and selling his collection of every Newton ever made.
Venzon has run the website since 2001. Venzon said his collection includes “one of every Newton ever made plus every developer scrap of paper, software and manual.” The collection is for sale through eBay.
“I’m closing up shop for the very prozaic reason that my wife and I are remodeling our house, and the collection is housed in a room we are tearing out to make space for a family room,” Venzon said. “The sale is also helping to pay for it. My hosting is up in June, so I’ll be passing it on to the person who buys the collection, if they want it.”
Venzon added: “I still use my original Newton I bought in 1993, though. I’m keeping that!”
Update: I emailed Venzon to ask how much he thought the collection was worth. Venzon, a feature film editor, replied:
“I don’t have any idea how much money I plan to get, as it’s kind of bittersweet to hope for anyway.
I’ve been collecting, really, since I bought my first Newton back in 1993.
Alex Olivares and I used it as a film calculator on Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
We were assistant editors on the movie, and since Oliver was shooting so many different formats, we had to know how the 16mm footage would end up once it was blown up to 35mm.
We used a beta version of GoFigure to do much of the math. The guys at Dubl-Click software were great, and would tweak the code as we used it.
Ah, Newton, is there nothing you can’t do?
