GO Corporation – Catalog of Products and Services (Letter)

By the time this letter went out on May 28, 1993, the Catalog of Products and Services it asked developers to update was already an established GO Corporation sales tool. PenPoint had been on the market for thirteen months (the commercial release was April 16, 1992), and the catalog was the booklet GO handed out at COMDEX booths, industry seminars, and sales calls when potential customers asked about software support.

At the start of 1991, GO had five publicly committed software partners: Borland, Lotus, WordPerfect, Slate, and PenSoft, which had announced the previous July. The company used its January 22, 1991 PenPoint unveiling to introduce thirty-five more, bringing the public roster to forty.¹

By that October, GO’s internal directory listed over 75 providers of PenApps tools and vertical industry expertise, and the company was demonstrating a first wave of what it called “pencentric” software at COMDEX: notetakers, personal organizers, intelligent forms, electronic books, and pen-aware versions of spreadsheets and word processors.²

The April 1992 commercial release added another twenty-two software partners shipping product on day one, three new hardware makers including Toshiba, NEC, and TelePad joining the existing twenty-two, and a Product Showcase featuring “over 30 breakthrough applications” at the PenPoint Premiere.³

Seven months later GO bundled five of those programs into a “Hot Apps” holiday promotion — InkWare NoteTaker, Pensoft’s Personal Perspective, PenMagic’s Executive Assistant (a Numero special edition), Sitka’s PenCentral, and Notable’s PenCROSS — and gave them away to anyone who bought a PenPoint computer before December 31, 1992.⁴

The letter went out about eleven weeks before the August 13, 1993 announcement that GO and EO would be folded together into a single AT&T subsidiary, the move that ended GO as an independent company.⁵

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes