GO Announces Industry-Wide Support for PenPoint

April 16, 1992 — GO Corp. Thursday announced, with hardware and software partners, the availability of innovative, new products for its PenPoint operating system.

The announcement was made Thursday in conjunction with the availability of PenPoint. The combination of PenPoint and newly available hardware platforms, application software, development tools and connectivity products will enable the mobile pen market to develop rapidly.

Three new hardware providers, NEC Technologies Inc., Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. and TelePad Corp. Thursday announced their support for PenPoint. NEC, Toshiba and TelePad joined 22 other hardware providers that have announced their support of PenPoint.

In addition GO expects pen computers running PenPoint from IBM, NCR, GRiD and NEC to be available in 90 days or sooner, allowing customers to have immediate access to PenPoint and innovative new software products.

Twenty-two GO software partners announced the availability of brand new, innovative software products specifically designed for mobile computing, joining the growing list of applications already announced for PenPoint computers. The new software products announced include a range of horizontal and industry-specific applications, communications solutions and handwriting recognition products designed specifically to take advantage of the unique features of PenPoint.

GO also announced its Customs Solutions Program, a joint marketing alliance with several of its software partners designed to greatly increase the number of custom solutions developed for PenPoint. The initial participants in this alliance are PenMagic Software Inc., Pensoft Corp. and Slate Corp., each of which has products that can be used for developing solutions on PenPoint.

These companies are authorized to distribute GO’s PenPoint Software Development Kit (SDK) along with their respective development tools. In addition, GO announced it has authorized both Ingram/Micro D and Merisal to distribute the PenPoint SDK. Development on PenPoint can be done using either a pen computer or a traditional desktop PC. Because of this development environment that is readily available and more cost effective, many more people can develop custom solutions for PenPoint.

Developers are creating new software categories by building on PenPoint’s unique pen and paper metaphor. These products are designed to address mobile users’ need for simplicity and ease of use. Because of PenPoint’s object-oriented architecture, applications have a more consistent user interface, making them easy to learn and use.

“Mobile computing has arrived,” said William V. Campbell, president and chief executive officer of GO Corp. “We’ve worked very closely with our hardware and software partners to ensure that the components needed for a complete customer total pen solution was available simultaneously.”

“All these innovative products have been designed for a new class of mobile user — millions of individuals that do work away from their desk and who, until now, have not been able to take advantage of conventional personal computers.”

New Hardware Providers Announce Their Support of PenPoint

Toshiba announced it will develop a pen computer using GO’s PenPoint operating system. Richard Geruson, vice president of marketing for Toshiba’s Computer Systems Division said, “We’re experiencing increasing interest in pen computing from large customers in established areas such as sales force automation, as well as emerging application areas such as nursing, insurance adjusting and law enforcement.”

NEC announced that application developers can develop PenPoint applications with GO’s PenPoint SDK on NEC’s new UltraLite SL/20P notebook computer. TelePad announced it will release a PenPoint version of its TelePad SL pen computer late this summer.

“We are very pleased to welcome NEC, Toshiba and TelePad as our newest hardware partners. These new commitments to PenPoint reinforce GO’s leadership position in the emerging mobile pen computing market.” said Campbell.

Breakthrough Software Products

Over 30 breakthrough applications will be demonstrated in the Product Showcase at the PenPoint Premiere. Nearly all of them are designed from the ground up to take advantage of PenPoint’s pen and paper metaphor, tightly integrated handwriting and gesture capabilities as well as the rich object-oriented environment.

New types of applications highlighting different requirements of mobile users — notetakers, personal information man-agers, communications, financial/spreadsheets — are featured in the PenPoint Product Showcase.

Rapid development of applications for PenPoint is enabled through the benefits of object-oriented programming. The modularity of the operating system allows for efficient code reuse and generally results in applications which are quite small in size. The user benefits from a consistency of ease of use across all applications and the operating system itself.
Productivity Application Software

— Ink Development Corp. announced InkWare NoteTaker, the first notetaker for pen computers; and InkWare Photo, a digital photography application for PenPoint computers.

— Notable Technologies Inc. announced two software packages developed specifically for the PenPoint operating system. The new products are PenLiner, an intelligent outlining note-book; and PenCROSS, an innovative adaptation of the familiar crossword puzzle.

— PenMagic announced Numero, a financial work processor software product that enables mobile pen computer users to complete a wide variety of financial tasks.

— PenStuff Inc. announced FinancialStuff, its second pen-based financial application for GO Corp.’s Pen-Point operating system. FinancialStuff is an easy to use financial analysis package.
Industry-Specific Application Software

— American Data Voice Systems Inc. announced Mortgage Master, a modular, pen-based computer system that provides true mobility and ease of use for field personnel involved in the Loan Origination, Property Appraisal and Title Search aspects of the mortgage lending process.

— American TriTech announced PenChart for PenPoint, a family of application frameworks developed to address the unique needs of EMS (Emergency Medical Services), Law Enforcement, Fire and Health Care.

— Greycat Inc. announced ScratchPad, the newest tool in automated physician daily notetaking.

— Map-Frame Corp. announced its Penovation Mapping Series, a family of mapping and GIS packages for PenPoint-based computers.

— Penergy Inc. announced PenTrial, an electronic notebook for the pharmaceutical industry which replaces hundreds of paper forms normally used in the clinical trial of a new drug.

Development Tools

— First Pen Systems Inc. announced its pen based Screen Interactive Layout Product (PenSIL), which allows end users, VARs, system integrators and consultants to easily create and edit graphical interfaces for PenPoint applications.

— IQ Interface announced the release of xBase Engine 1.0, a library of functions for PenPoint which provide access to dBase format data, index and memo files.

— NovoTech announced Objective-C Compiler, an object-oriented programming language for PenPoint; and ICPak 101 Reusable Component Library for PenPoint.

— Oracle announced client support for GO’s PenPoint operating system. Oracle will provide a developers toolkit allowing ISVs, VARs, and client/server application developers to build interfaces between PenPoint and ORACLE and IBM databases. The toolkit will include support for Oracle’s programmatic interfaces as well as a version of SQL*Net, Oracle’s popular client server networking software.

— Pensoft Corp. announced Perspective Custom Solutions Bundle, which support the creation of custom productivity solutions for Pensoft Perspective, the intelligent personal information manager for pen computers.

— ram-Book Publishing Inc. announced PenPoint API an Architectural Reference ramBooks, which are cross-referenced, hyper-text, on-line versions of the PenPoint API and Architectural Reference Programming Manuals.

— Slate Corp. announced Slate PenApps 1.0 applications builder, an applications development environment for PenPoint.

— WATCOM announced WATCOM SQL for PenPoint, an SQL database engine for GO Corp.’s PenPoint operating system.

Communications Products

— Sitka Corp. announced shipment of its PenTOPS networking software, which will be bundled with every copy of GO’s PenPoint operating system.

Handwriting Recognition Products

— CIC announced Handwriter, the first multi-lingual handwriting recognition system for PenPoint computers.

— Nestor announced the availability of Nestor’s handwriting recognition software, NestorWriter, for PenPoint.

— OCR Systems Inc. announced the availability of ReadRight Pen for GO’s PenPoint operating system, a handprint recognition engine for pen computers.

— ParaGraph International demonstrated CalliGrapher, its cursive handwriting recognition product.

The complete list of PenPoint products and services is available in the PenPoint Resource Guide.

GO Corp., a privately held company headquartered in Foster City, Calif., develops, markets, and supports a pen operating system and applications designed for mobile users, worldwide.

Note to Editors: PenPoint is a trademark of GO Corp. All other products or brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

CONTACT:
GO Corp., Foster City
Marcia Mason, 415/358-2075
or
Regis McKenna Inc.
Kim Tarter, 415/354-4486