GO Corp. Announces Availability of PenPoint

April 16, 1992 — GO Corp. announced Thursday the commercial release of PenPoint.

This award-winning operating system – uniquely designed to meet the needs of mobile computer users – is enabling an exciting new mobile, pen computing market. PenPoint incorporates a number of new enhancements which include; an advanced 32-bit architecture, new levels of ease of use, and a new handwriting engine – GOWrite.

Advanced 32-bit Architecture

PenPoint has been designed as a modern 32-bit, preemptive multitasking, general-purpose operating system uniquely suited to mobile pen computing. Since its initial unveiling to the developer community in January of 1991. PenPoint has been re-engineered to take full advantage of the 386 and subsequent 32 bit architectures.

The processing power of the 80386 gives PenPoint the bandwidth and performance for delivering truly powerful system and application functionality. PenPoint utilizes the protect mode of the 80386, which greatly increases overall system reliability. An important benefit of the protect mode is that if an application should crash PenPoint and other applications are not affected. As a processor-independent, flat memory model operating system, PenPoint will soon support RISC-based machines as well.

Preemptive multitasking has always been an important feature of PenPoint – mobile computing requires instant access to critical information. The user’s pen takes priority even while background tasks such as handwriting and communications are processing.

A new feature of PenPoint is the ability to use virtual memory. This allows the system to utilize a hard disk as an extension to physical RAM. Users are then able to open more documents simultaneously or use large documents with-out having to add physical RAM. With a focus on lighter and less expensive mobile pen computers, this feature optimizes the efficiency of the system.

New Level of Ease of Use

Since the Developer Release of PenPoint, GO has conducted over 2300 hours of formal user testing to further refine PenPoint’s ease of use. Based on this research, GO has incorporated a number of key enhancements including a new and integrated Settings Notebook where users can quickly access all of their system preferences and installed software.

New standard applications menus provide more consistent access to features and functions across applications. Access-ing networks and external devices has also been greatly simplified through the use of the Connections Notebook – a consistent user interface for connecting to printers, file servers, floppy drives or other devices.

GO has also incorporated several on-line help facilities so that users can quickly and easily learn PenPoint. Quick Help offers context sensitive help. Simply drawing a question mark on any item on the screen displays a concise help description. The Help Notebook provides more complete topic-based help information.

GO has also designed Quick Start tutorials which gets the user started with PenPoint and PenPoint applications in ten minutes or less. These tutorial documents are bundled with PenPoint (for the operating system as well as PenPoint applications). Quick Start documents will also be available for third party applications.

GOWrite

GO has developed an entirely new handwriting recognition engine for this release of PenPoint. This new technology was designed specifically to improve upon the developer release engine in areas that GO’s extensive User Research pro-gram identified as important for business applications.

The GOWrite engine focuses on a number of areas for improved performance including; much better “walk-up” accuracy (no training or practice), much more robust recognition, more tolerance of sloppiness and shape variation, trainability and much broader coverage. GOWrite also recognizes more symbols than the previous engine ( 25 punctuation characters) and a greater variation of writing styles using a database of over 700,000 handwriting and gesture samples.

“Walk-up” accuracy is of particular importance in that some customers do not have the patience to train the system to recognize their writing. In addition, extensive training is impractical for some business applications.

GO is committed to ensuring that the best handwriting recognition technology is available to users of PenPoint (regard-less of whether or not it comes from GO). The company is licensing its extensive database of over 700,000 handwriting and gesture samples to any handwriting ISV who has ported their technology to PenPoint. In addition, GO has an active program of supporting third party developers’ efforts to port their recognition systems to PenPoint.

PenPoint Advantages

PenPoint offers unique features unavailable on other operating systems, including an extremely easy-to-use interface based on familiar pen and paper concepts and an architecture designed for meeting the unique challenges of mobile connectivity.

PenPoint is easy to use, even for people who have never used a computer before. You interact with PenPoint much like you use pen and paper in an ordinary notebook: you simply write, scribble and take notes. Users can move from one page to another – and in the process, one application to another — effortlessly and transparently, without ever seeing or having to understand applications, files or directories.

Applications are integrated into PenPoint through the same Notebook User Interface so that users access applications in a consistent and familiar way — by simply working with documents.

Mobile, pen-based systems require more flexible communications capabilities including wireless networking and high-speed wide area networking. PenPoint was designed with these new networking systems in mind and delivers unique communication capabilities to support mobile connectivity.

For example, PenPoint auto-connects and auto-disconnects from networks transparently, so users can walk in and out of a wireless network range without interrupting their work.

PenPoint can also easily be integrated into your existing PC environment. PenPoint can read and write MS-DOS for-matted disks directly and can import and export many standard file formats such as RTF and TIFF. PenPoint’s flexible communications architecture provides support for industry standard networking environments such as Novell’s NetWare, AppleTalk and TCP/IP natively.

Due to its unique design and these user advantages, PenPoint has garnered virtually every industry award for technical excellence over the course of last year. These include the Byte Product Excellence Award, the Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine, a Most Valuable Product of the year Award from PC/Computing Magazine, the Most Influential Product Award from Personal Computer World (UK) and PC World’s World Class award for most promising newcomer.

The PenPoint Software Development Kit

Today GO is shipping the PenPoint Software Development Kit, which includes an executable copy of the PenPoint operating system, as well as tools and documentation so developers can quickly become productive.

Within the PenPoint environment is a built-in framework that enables the design of complex applications. For example, using PenPoint’s exclusive Application Framework, developers can quickly create applications with the PenPoint look and feel.

With PenPoint, developers can concentrate on developing application-specific features, because the PenPoint application framework comes with a complete library of generic application features such as interface elements, spell, find, EDA, and a handwriting recognition system.

This enables developers to develop compact, yet full featured applications.

To begin, all a developer needs is the PenPoint Software Development Kit, a 80386- or 80486-compatible PC with DOS, and a digitizer tablet to emulate a pen computer. Developers can develop applications using the WATCOM C/386 32-bit C compiler, or build customized applications that can run on PenPoint using application development tools available from third-party vendors.

Availability

Today GO is shipping the PenPoint Software Development Kit which includes PenPoint and can be run on a variety of compatible desktop PCs. PenPoint will be made available directly to end users of tablet systems through IBM, NCR, GRiD, and other OEMs. The PenPoint Software Development Kit is available from GO Corporation, Merisel and In-gram/Micro D beginning in April.

Go Corporation, a privately held company headquartered in Foster City, Calif., develops, markets and supports Pen-Point, a pen operating system, and applications designed for mobile users, worldwide.

Note to Editors: PenPoint and GO Write are trademarks of GO Corporation. 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