EO, Inc. – Introducing the EO Personal Communicator (Brochure)

This brochure introduces the EO Personal Communicator 440 and EO Personal Communicator 880, devices that put fax, electronic mail, cellular phone, and personal computing capabilities into a single hand-held unit.¹ Both models are presented under the tagline "Person-to-Person Communications — Anytime, Anywhere".² The back panel gives the company's address as 800A East Middlefield Road, Mountain View, California.³

EO Inc. was founded in 1991 as a partnership with AT&T, Matsushita, and Marubeni to design, build, and market a new class of products the partners called personal communicators.⁴ AT&T contributed key microelectronics components, Matsushita supplied advanced manufacturing and high-volume consumer-electronics expertise, and Marubeni provided global sourcing and distribution support, with additional funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.⁴ The partners agreed to promote an open platform centered on GO Corporation's PenPoint operating system and AT&T's Hobbit microprocessor.⁴

EO formally unveiled the Personal Communicator 440 and 880 on November 4, 1992 at COMDEX/Fall in Las Vegas.¹ The EO 440 weighed 2.2 pounds and ran a 20 MHz Hobbit processor; the EO 880 weighed 4 pounds and ran a 30 MHz Hobbit.¹ Both shipped with the PenPoint operating system and nine applications resident in 8 MB of ROM — covering faxing, electronic mail, note-taking, calculation, scheduling, and address-book management — alongside a built-in 14,400 bps V.32bis modem with 9600 bps fax send and receive.¹ Pensoft Corporation's Personal Perspective scheduling, address book, to-do, and note-taking software was bundled into the ROM of every unit.⁵ Configurations ranged from $1,999 for a basic EO 440 with 4 MB of RAM to $3,299 for an EO 880 with 8 MB of RAM and an internal modem, with an optional cellular module priced at $799.¹ The EO 440 was named a finalist in the Best Portable category at BYTE magazine's "Best of COMDEX/Fall" awards on November 18, 1992.⁶

On November 16, 1992 AT&T announced that the AT&T Personal Communicator 440 — designed and supplied by EO — would be sold through AT&T Phone Centers beginning in early 1993, with prices ranging from $1,999 for a basic model to $2,899 for a fully equipped device.⁷ Every EO user received a free subscription to an AT&T EasyLink Services AT&T Mail electronic mailbox accessible through a toll-free 800 number in the United States.¹ The brochure organizes the device's functions into six actions — Write, Send, Receive, File, Organize, and Connect — with a short caption guiding the reader through each capability.²

On February 8, 1993 EO announced an agreement with General Magic to implement General Magic's Telescript intelligent messaging technology on PenPoint-based personal communicators.⁸ Volume shipments of the EO Personal Communicator 440 began in April 1993 from Matsushita Electric's manufacturing plant in Franklin Park, Illinois, with EO Personal Communicators already in the hands of more than sixty corporations.⁹ On June 1, 1993 AT&T and EO announced an agreement that would make AT&T the majority shareholder in EO and put the AT&T brand on EO's personal communicators.¹⁰ On June 7, 1993 MiniStor Peripherals Corp. announced that EO had selected its 64 MB, 1.8-inch ruggedized hard disk drive as the primary storage device for the EO Personal Communicator 880.¹¹

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes