GO Announces PenPoint Operating System for Mobile Pen-Based Computing

January 22, 1991 — GO Corp. Tuesday announced February availability of the developer release of PenPoint, the only general-purpose operating system designed for mobile computers operated by a pen instead of a keyboard or mouse.

The developer release of PenPoint, for independent software vendors (ISVs) and value-added resellers (VARs), will be followed by a commercial version for end users to be released in late 1991.

GO is working with hardware and software companies to create broad market appeal for small, lightweight pen-based computers for mobile professionals and is licensing the PenPoint operating system to enable the development of standards in this new market where no standards yet exist.

”With this release of the PenPoint operating system, developers, ISVs and VARs can now ready applications for this emerging market,” said S. Jerrold Kaplan, GO chairman and co-founder. ”Today’s announcement moves us closer to our vision of bringing new applications to new users and new settings.”

Today GRiD Systems Corp. and NCR Corp. announced that they will support PenPoint on new pen-based computers. Last year IBM Corp.  became the first hardware manufacturer to license the PenPoint operating system technology.

Twenty-one new software developers, six new connectivity hardware and software companies, and thirteen systems integrators and vertical application developers announced today that they are doing development or providing technology for the PenPoint operating system. This brings to 40 the total number of software companies that have announced support for PenPoint.

Last year, Borland International Inc., Lotus Development Corp., WordPerfect Corp., Slate Corp. and PenSoft Corp. announced that they were doing development for PenPoint.

The PenPoint operating system is designed to appeal to a host of new users, including salespeople, service technicians, managers and executives, field engineers, insurance agents and adjustors and government inspectors — anyone whose work requires mobile computing.

Early PenPoint adopters are expected to develop vertical applications to generate and complete forms in the field, prepare expense reports, provide electronic data reference in the field, send and receive faxes and electronic mail, maintain inventory status reports, and create dynamic presentations in which input is collected in the field and presented directly on a computer screen or through an overhead projector.

In addition, applications such as spreadsheets, personal information managers and interactive mobile presentations are expected to kindle broad interest among existing computer users. Also envisioned are document markup and revision capability, graphics/drawing applications, and electronic notetaking and the ability to search and sort a large volume of information.

Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor, GO estimates that the majority of U.S. professionals do not use PCs because they either don’t work at a desk or do most of their work in groups of people — situations where using a laptop is cumbersome, and pen and paper are more acceptable.

”We believe a new approach is needed to address the needs of this market,” said Kaplan. ”We developed a powerful, general-purpose operating system that harnesses the power of the pen and supports the unique requirements of truly mobile computing. The pen is not an option, the pen is the point.”

The PenPoint operating system features a number of innovations, including the Notebook User Interface (NUI) and the Embedded Document Architecture (EDA). In addition, it includes support for mobile connectivity, a compact and highly hardware-independent design and a 32-bit, fully object-oriented development environment.

In the Notebook User Interface, a notebook with a table of contents serves as the PenPoint operating system’s central organizational and navigational structure. Users are insulated from the complexity of applications and file management, interacting instead with ”documents.”

Documents are identified by page numbers and can be accessed through the table of contents. The NUI also incorporates handwriting recognition and ”gestures” or pen-generated commands, such as writing an X to delete or circling to edit. These gestures work consistently throughout the PenPoint operating system.

The handwriting recognition engine in the PenPoint operating system translates printed upper and lower case letters, digits and punctuation in many handwriting styles. Applications can provide contextual rules — such as whether only numbers are expected in a particular input area or whether words should be checked against a reference list — to aid translation accuracy.

”Mobile, pen-based computing is much more than handwriting translation,” said Robert Carr, GO vice president of software and co-founder.

”Therefore, we designed PenPoint around the idea of a pen and paper, rather than taking an existing keyboard-oriented system and merely adding a pen. Users are able to use the pen in a natural, seamless way, similar to the way they would on paper.”

PenPoint’s innovative Embedded Document Architecture (EDA) lets users combine different ”live” data types within the same document by embedding one document inside another. A user might have a single master document with text (word processor), an organizational chart (drawing program) and a table (spreadsheet) and be able to access or modify all of this data simultaneously.

The hyperlinking feature, which allows the user’s entire workspace to exist as one integrated hypertext document, is a standard element of PenPoint’s EDA. A simple gesture can be used to create a hyperlink button, linking any two locations in the Notebook.

Because mobile, pen-based users have unique connectivity requirements, PenPoint has been designed with a number of innovative mobile connectivity features. PenPoint’s instant-on feature allows users to work immediately, without delays for rebooting. Detachable networking lets users connect and disconnect from networks several times a day without rebooting or issuing a special software command.

Another feature provided by PenPoint to support mobile connectivity is deferred input/output. This capability allows users to move from their offices to business meetings, to hotels and airplanes or cars and continue to work as if they were connected to a local area network (LAN) or a telephone line.

Operations such as printing, faxing and electronic mail access are automatically suspended until the user returns to a location where a LAN or telephone line is available, at which time deferred operations are executed without user intervention. PenPoint also reads and writes MS-DOS-formatted disks and provides a consistent file import and export system, making it easy to share data with other computer systems.

PenPoint’s compact implementation makes it ideally suited for small, lightweight computers. Its fully object-oriented design allows substantial code sharing and reuse, resulting in much smaller applications than with conventional operating systems. In addition, PenPoint scales easily to a variety of formats from shirt-pockets to wall-size computers. This scalability is possible because of PenPoint’s highly hardware-independent design and an automatic constraint-based layout feature that enables applications to look visually correct regardless of screen size.

PenPoint is a modern, fully object-oriented, multitasking operating system designed to support the Intel 80386 family. Its 32-bit flat memory model architecture makes it readily portable to other microprocessor families, such as high-speed RISC chips, in the future.  A compact but powerful imaging model, ImagePoint, provides outline fonts, image rotation and scaling, and sampled image rendering.

The developer release of the PenPoint operating system runs on GO pilot hardware, while the commercial release of PenPoint will run on 80386-based hardware from a variety of vendors.

Software developers and VARs may obtain further information on GO’s Penpoint operating system by contacting the company directly at 415/345-7400.

GO, a privately held company headquartered in Foster City, Calif., was founded in 1987 to develop pen-based computing technology.

Note to Editors: The GO and PenPoint logo and names, EDA and Imagepoint, are trademarks of GO Corp. All other marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of the manufacturers with which the marks are associated.

CONTACT:
Wilson McHenry Co., Foster City, Calif.
Lerry Wilson or Julie McHenry, 415/592-7600