Talk:PenPoint OS

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PenPoint was and is a Masterpiece in my opinion. Too bad it is nolonger available. Or is it? AT&T seems to have no documentation reguarding this gem. If anyone knows where to look, please point this out.

I would like to thank Mr Kaplan and Mr Carr for bestowing there genius appon us and remind them that it is not forgoten.

Thanks for the kind words. I think a Taiwanese company bought the intellectual property when GO/EO went under, but did nothing with it, so the O.S. is owned but unavailable. At one of the alumni reunions I met a guy at a small independent software vendor who sold apps based on PenPoint; he had acquired a license for the source code and had made some improvements like limited color support and support on recent tablet computers. In addition to the user-friendly The Power of PenPoint book mentioned in the Wikipedia article, Addison-Wesley published a GO Technical Library including Penpoint Programming ISBN 0201608332. -- Skierpage 06:26, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually it was not purchased by a Taiwanese company, though commonly thought so for good reason. In 1994 ITRI (a Tiawanese Industrial consortium) initially agreed to purchase EO's intellectual property, and in fact hired many former EO/GO employees to train their engineers for the technology transfer. Though the technology transfer completed, the deal never did. In the meantime former developers were negotiating with EO's CEO Bob Evans to release all the the code to open source. This may have happened if no other licensees came to the table, but at least one did, that person you met at the alumni meeting, and went quite a long way with it. The company was called Mobilepoint, and I worked there for several years making it happen (and oh yes, I remember many years earlier, getting a lot of help learning to develop on this great OS from an awesome developer support person named S Page ;-) BTW, the original source code and subsequent versions is available, though it might take quite awhile to figure out licensing with its current owners. Even today, there might be some relevancy to its study especially on low-end products concepts such as electronic paper displays that E Ink is supporting. Wanderbookman (talk) 08:12, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

TODO: Awards and innovation

The article needs updating with all awards PenPoint won ("Byte Magazine O.S. of the year", umm, ??) and more details of its UI and API innovations:

• large set of gestures like circle tap
• press and hold for copying
• Notebook metaphor (that asshole Microsoft shamelessly ripped off for their paper announcement of Windows for Pen Computering after GO disclosed PenPoint to them).
• really simple document embedding (compared with 600 pages of OLE thanks to the underlying "each document is a directory nested in another document's directory" architecture)

I'd need time to dig up references for all those... I'll paste this section in and see if it survives. -- Skierpage 06:26, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Hey, I have listed a few articles from BYTE. Hope they are helpful. - wneo (talk) 09:10, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

BYTE

• Searching for "PenPoint" in the Internet Archive's BYTE Magazine collection returned 15 results. Volume Titles are from Vintage Byte Magazine Library

• Laptop Technologies (Volume 16 Number 02; Feb 1991)

• Laptop Technologies
• The Point of the Pen: GO's new PenPoint operating system brings handwriting recognition to the laptop.

• Network Management (Volume 16 Number 03; Mar 1991)

• Microsoft Taps Windows to Support Pens
• Grid Will Work with PenPoint and PenWindows

• Developing Applications Across Platforms (Volume 17 Number 01; Jan 1992)

• The Palmtop 386 Is Getting Closer
• The 1991 BYTE Awards: The best products of the last year get the recognition they deserve
• Let the System Do The Porting

• Memory and Storage Advances (Volume 17 Number 03; Mar 1992)

• The Future of Pen Computing, Part 1

• An Interface For All Senses (Volume 17 Number 04; Apr 1992)

• WATCOM (Ad)
• Spreadsheet Could Boost PenPoint
• The Future of Pen Computing, Part 2
• Wireless Networking

• A New World of Displays and Image-Processing (Volume 17 Number 07; Jul 1992)

• WATCOM (Ad)
• The PC Gets More Personal

• Real-Time Computing (Volume 17 Number 08; Aug 1992)

• Wireless Data Communications for Service Workers
• WATCOM (Ad)
• Day-Timers Go Electronics
• A New Take on an Old Theme
• Get Instant On-Site CAD Feedback

• Photonics (Volume 17 Number 09; Sep 1992)

• The Outlook for Pen Computing
• WATCOM (Ad)

• 1992 BYTE Awards (Volume 18 Number 01; Jan 1993)

• Two Toshiba Systems to Go
• The 1992 BYTE Awards
• Digitizer Renaissance

• Create CD-ROMs (Volume 18 Number 02; Feb 1993)

• WATCOM (Ad)
• Pen Application Builder
• Communications Get Personal

• Smarter E-mail (Volume 18 Number 03; Mar 1993)

• WATCOM (Ad)
• EO's Personal Communicator Ushers In a New Era
• Collaborative Computing

• Fighting Fatware (Volume 18 Number 04; Apr 1993)

• WATCOM (Ad)
• A Pentop to Flip Over

• Which Windows? (Volume 18 Number 06; Jun 1993) Alternative

• Windows Bias (Letter)
• Anstrad's Affordable Pen Package
• Windows, Windows, Everywhere?

• Pentium PCs Volume 18 Number 08 (Aug 1993)

• Applying the Power of the Pen

Hope this helps editors with references. - wneo (talk) 16:17, 25 March 2022 (UTC)