GO Corporation – PenPoint Architectural Reference – Volume I

The PenPoint Architectural Reference, Volume I is a developer manual issued by GO Corporation as part of its GO Technical Library and published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company in April 1992.¹ Together with Volume II, it provides a comprehensive description of the Application Programming Interface (API) for the PenPoint operating system, documenting the functions and messages used to manipulate classes and the fundamental classes used by almost all PenPoint applications.¹ The topics it covers include the PenPoint class manager, the PenPoint Application Framework, the ImagePoint graphics imaging model, the PenPoint user interface toolkit, and the PenPoint input subsystem and handwriting translation.¹

GO Corporation, headquartered in Foster City, California, had announced the PenPoint operating system on January 22, 1991, describing it as a general-purpose operating system designed for mobile computers operated by a pen rather than a keyboard or mouse.² The developer release, intended for independent software vendors and value-added resellers, was scheduled for February 1991.² GO described PenPoint as a modern, fully object-oriented, multitasking operating system with a 32-bit flat memory model designed to support the Intel 80386 family, incorporating the Notebook User Interface, the Embedded Document Architecture, and the ImagePoint imaging model.²

By October 1991, more than 500 individuals and organizations had begun PenPoint development, and GO announced a beta program leading to the production release of PenPoint 1.0, planned for the first quarter of 1992.³ On April 16, 1992, GO announced the commercial release of PenPoint and began shipping the PenPoint Software Development Kit, which included an executable copy of the operating system along with tools and documentation so that developers could quickly become productive.⁴ The kit's Application Framework supplied a library of generic application features, and developers could build applications using the WATCOM C/386 32-bit compiler on an 80386- or 80486-compatible PC with a digitizer tablet to emulate a pen computer.⁴

In conjunction with that release, GO announced industry-wide support for PenPoint, and among the development tools unveiled, ram-Book Publishing announced cross-referenced, hypertext, on-line versions of the PenPoint API and Architectural Reference programming manuals.⁵ The printed GO Technical Library to which this volume belongs also included the PenPoint Application Writing Guide, the PenPoint User Interface Design Reference, PenPoint Development Tools, PenPoint Architectural Reference, Volume II, and the two-volume PenPoint API Reference.¹

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes