Sitka Announces PenTOPS and PenCentral — First Mobile Networking Solutions for Pen-Based Computing

February 10, 1992 — Sitka Corp. Monday announced the availability of its new peer-to-peer, pen connectivity platform — the PenTOPS and PenCentral products.

Together, PenTOPS and PenCentral are the first mobile network solution for third-party developers building pen computing applications. PenTOPS and PenCentral are immediately available from Sitka and can also be purchased separately through OEMs.

Sitka president and chief executive officer, Deborah D. Triant, stated: ”For vendors entering the burgeoning pen computing market, design issues are critical, especially pen connectivity.

”We believe that pen computing has spawned the need for a complete mobile network that provides users with the ability to instantly and effortlessly connect their pen system to any other mobile or deskbound system, at any time, from any location.

”Sitka developed PenTOPS and PenCentral to provide third parties with a platform that would allow them to build this easy-to-use, instant connectivity into their pen computers, applications and systems. GO Corp. and IBM have already adopted our platform.”

Kathy Vieth, vice president, tablet systems, entry systems technology, IBM Corp., said. ”Our agreement with Sitka to license a pen-based networking solution is further evidence of innovation occurring within the industry that will help foster the worldwide marketplace for pen-based computing.

”IBM believes that the availability of networking software technology solutions is imperative to the success of the pen computing industry.”

”Sitka’s pen connectivity solution, PenTOPS, is an important technology further enabled by the PenPoint connectivity architecture. It is available with the PenPoint operating system free of charge to OEMs,” stated William Campbell, chief executive officer of GO Corp. ”With PenTOPS and PenCentral, Sitka has developed a unique connectivity solution for networking on the go.”

The Sitka pen networking technology is based on an architecture that will support easy-to-use, peer-to-peer connectivity between PenPoint, DOS, Macintosh, and UNIX environments.

The technology will be rolled out over the next year in two phases.

Phase One

Phase one consists of PenTOPS client and the PenCentral server.

— PenTOPS client software, jointly developed with GO Corp., comes bundled with the PenPoint operating system for OEMs as a native PenPoint service. Via high-speed serial port (LocalTalk), PenTOPS users can transparently access files and printers available to PCs, Macintoshes, and Sun workstations via MacTOPS, DosTOPS, and SunTOPS.

Tablet vendors with a wide range of hard-wired and wireless connectivity solutions — from parallel and serial ports to infrared, radio frequency and cellular — will also have cross-platform connectivity via PenTOPS.

PenTOPS is integrated with PenPoint’s import and export facilities to translate PenPoint documents to and from other file formats such as RTF and ASCII. PenTOPS is also fully integrated with PenPoint’s ”Connections Notebook” and remote file system architecture, thus assuring a simple and consistent user interface for end-users.

— The PenCentral server was developed for tablet vendors who have requested pen connectivity via serial or parallel ports. PenCentral is a DOS-based server-only product that allows PenTOPS users to transparently access files and printers available to the PenCentral server via serial port, parallel port and modem.

Mobile users may take advantage of PenCentral in two ways: as a simple tablet-to-PC file transfer solution, or as a docking station to allow tablet users to access a corporate network. PenCentral supports multiple tablet connections to the server, and allows gateway access to drivers and printers on NetWare and/or LAN Manager networks.

Phase Two

Phase two of Sitka’s pen networking products will include a full implementation of the OpenTOPS architecture, as well as an implementation of deferred I/O for PenPoint document transfer. An OpenTOPS-based implementation of PenTOPS will benefit end-users and developers in a number of ways:

— PenTOPS will support a variety of underlying transport protocol choices such as AppleTalk and NetBEUI. Sitka is committed to delivering the AppleTalk and NetBEUI protocols for OpenTOPS in 1992.  The OpenTOPS architecture will make it easy for third parties to provide additional protocol support to suit the needs of specific computing environments.

— PenTOPS will support easy-to-use, cross-platform networking to additional hardware platforms and environments including OS/2, Windows, and Windows for Pen Computing.

— PenTOPS will support direct tablet-to-tablet file sharing.

PenCentral is available to OEMs now directly from Sitka.

Sitka Corp., formerly TOPS, was founded in 1984 and pioneered the market for cross-platform, peer-to-peer networking products. Today the company has an international installed base of more than 700,000 nodes.  Sitka manufactures MacTOPS, DosTOPS, SunTOPS and PenTOPS networking software that allows users to easily share information across multiple vendor platforms and operating systems. The company also markets 10NET, a peer-to-peer networking product for Windows and DOS environments.

Sitka Corp., an independent subsidiary of Sun Microsystems Inc., is based in Alameda, with an international sales office in the United Kingdom.

Note to Editors: Sitka, PenTOPS, PenCentral and OpenTOPS are trademarks of Sitka Corp. GO and PenPoint are trademarks of GO Corp.  All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

CONTACT:
Sitka Corp., Alameda
Rebecca Fuller, 510/769-2580