If you lived only on the Internet, you might not know that Apple’s (AAPL) Newton, the father of all personal digital assistants, was discontinued in 1998.

About three times the size of most contemporary PDAs, the Newton was the predecessor to the Palm Pilot. But unlike the gadgets that followed in its wake, the Newton has a feature that continues to fascinate and attract users – it recognizes handwriting.

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There are Newton blogs, Newton Web sites (organized by something called the United Network of Newton Archives), Newton social networking sites, an annual Worldwide Newton Conference, and seemingly more chatrooms dedicated to the handheld devices than just about any other gadget ever made.

“Personally, I can’t live without Five Speed’s Dashboard, but it really depends on what you’re looking to do with your Newton,” one enthusiast wrote recently on a popular social networking site.

The post reflects the common mix of die-hard exuberance and cutting edge technological savvy typical among current Newton users, who speak their own language.

But all of this belies the fact that Steve Jobs made killing the Newton project one of his first priorities after returning in 1998 to the helm of the company he founded in 1976.

“There was no product in the market like it. It was the predecessor to Palm and at the time it was an amazing device,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group.

Enderle said economics and politics played the primary roles in Apple’s decision to discontinue the Newton.

While the gadget, which was introduced in 1993, was for a time held up to widespread ridicule--including a scathing bit by Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury crowd – it seemed clear the Newton was at the forefront of mobile digital technology.

“By the end of its life it had actually improved quite a bit,” said Enderle.

Nevertheless, Apple was “bleeding money” in the late 1990s, and the Newton was a project supported by John Scully, the Apple CEO who had fired Jobs earlier that decade.

So when Jobs returned to Apple and replaced Scully,  Jobs wasted no time in dumping Scully’s Newton as one of his first cost-cutting measures.

“It’s hard to argue that cutting (Newton and other projects) didn’t keep the company alive,” said Enderle.

In hindsight, however, there’s a school of thought that believes Apple might have introduced its popular iPhones a few years earlier had it maintained and pursued the technology contained in the Newton rather than scrapping it.

“The iPhone is the current generation Newton,” noted Enderle. “It is most likely what the Newton what have evolved into.”

In any case, Palm stepped into the void left by Jobs’ decision to kill the Newton and PDAs subsequently exploded in popularity.

Since then, Newton fans--some might call them fanatics -- have kept the gadgets memory alive by staying in touch mostly on the Internet, where they trade innovations and software updates that allow them to keep up with contemporary shifts in PDA technology.

Perhaps a post from a blog called Newton Poetry summed it up best: “The Newton that we know and love has survived the cruel rejection by its parent, Apple, because its construction is such that it’s relatively straightforward to dismantle and otherwise tinker with. Even if such hardware tinkering isn’t to all our tastes, it’s doable for enough of us that all of us can benefit and the results are a thriving user base a decade after Apple stopped supporting it, and a machine that’s stable even if it’s no longer cutting edge.”