News Briefs

A Crowded Digitizer Market

Between existing digitizer/pen companies trying to grab greater visibility and new vendors getting into the market, the digitizer business is on its way to getting crowded. At Fall Comdex, digitizer veterans like Wacom, CalComp, SuperScript, MicroTouch had strong presences, but newcomers like Kurta and Logitech will be mounting challenges.

Although Kurta (Phoenix, AZ) has long been involved in the tablet business, the company used Comdex to unveil its first foray in the pen market with a 12-by-18 inch digitizer/pen for OEMs to build into portable devices or for desktop applications.

Nor does it comes as a surprise that Logitech (Fremont, CA), a leading input device vendor, should get into the fray. In this case, Logitech announced a joint venture with Gazelle Graphic Systems to distribute Gazelle’s electromagnetic digitizer/cordless pen.

Active Book and NCR?

A story in the McGraw-Hill newsweekly Byteweek (Nov. 4, 1991) reports that NCR (now a subsidiary of AT&T) and the Kleiner Perkins investment firm have joined forces with Active Book to produce a pen-based computer using a RISC processor, most likely the ARM chip that we covered in our August Vol 1. No. 4 issue (“Taking a RISC on RISC”).

While NCR’s involvement is unconfirmed, Active Book has indeed formed a new company called EO Computer with offices in both the U.K. and the United States, with intentions of delivering hardware that runs PenPoint, abandoning Smalltalk in favor of a C development environment.

Apparently, Active Book was unable to get a trademark for its name in the U.S., and therefore switched to EO Computer. In any event, we’ll have more on this in our February issue.

Watcom to Supply C for PenPoint

The PenPoint software development environment received a shot in the arm with the recent announcement that Watcom’s 32-bit C compiler will be supplied with GO’s PenPoint Software Developer’s Kit. Watcom (Waterloo, Ontario) is a well-respected compiler vendor in the PC arena, providing high-performance, optimizing 32-bit C and Fortran compilers. Actually, this alliance is less of a surprise when you realize that PenPoint itself was written using Watcom C.

Watcom C8.5/386 is a true protected-mode compiler that can generate 32-bit code for the 32-bit PenPoint operating system. GO and Watcom have worked together to adapt the compiler, linker, and libraries to meet the needs of PenPoint developers, according to Watcom’s press release. Additionally, Watcom’s C Run-time Library is an integral part of the PenPoint programming interface. Included with Watcom C8.5/386 is a royalty-free DOS extender developed by Rational Systems.