Matthias Melcher has successfully ported Einstein, an open source emulator to run Newton OS (that used to run on Apple Newton PDAs) on the iPhone.

If you had used and loved the Newton PDAs produced by Apple from 1993-1997 then you will definitely feel nostalgic when you see the video after the break.

Steven Portland of the Panic Blog was also able to take the source and run it on the iPad. He writes:

Einstein is an open-source project to run (via emulation) the Newton OS on modern hardware. It was written and released by Paul Guyot several years ago. It’s quite an amazing piece of work.

The project got a shot in the arm earlier this month when Matthias Melcher got it up and running on iOS and posted a video of himself running it on his iPhone. Being a Newton fan since my original MessagePad in 1993, it was quite a sight to see.

Matthias mentioned he didn’t have an iPad yet, so I grabbed the source and built it for my iPad so I could take a little movie and share

You can checkout the video of Matthias Melcher demonstrating Newton OS running on the iPhone below:

As you might have noticed, it’s a bit slow currently but Melcher has mentioned that speed will improve as there are a lot of optimizations yet to be made.

Melcher plans to submit the Einstein emulator to the App Store but it needs to be seen if Apple will approve it.

If you want to run Newton OS on your iPhone then you can checkout this link for the source code and documentation.

Let us know your thoughts on this latest port in the comments section below.