EO, Inc. – Personal Communicator 440 Letter and Order Form (John Jerney)

This artifact is a cover letter and accompanying order form that EO, Inc. mailed to John Jerney on March 22, 1993, inviting him — as "an active member in the PenPoint community" — to purchase one of the first EO Personal Communicator 440 units produced.¹ The letter, signed by EO vice president of marketing Pamela A. Miller, described the 440 as a 2.2-pound device for person-to-person communications that enabled wireless voice, fax, and e-mail messaging, and stated that EO was taking orders ahead of full-scale shipping expected in the April-to-May 1993 time frame, to be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.¹

The EO 440 belonged to a new class of device that AT&T Microelectronics had made possible in October 1992 with its Hobbit family of low-power processors, designed for small, mobile, pen-input products that exchanged voice, fax, and electronic mail over landline and wireless networks.² Every EO Personal Communicator shipped with Pensoft's Personal Perspective, a ROM-based scheduling, contact-management, and note-taking environment that EO chose as the device's hub application.³

The enclosed order form was headed by EO's headquarters address at 800A East Middlefield Road in Mountain View, California, and listed several configurations of the Personal Communicator alongside peripherals — an EO Keyboard, an EO Floppy Disk Drive, and a Cellular Module — together with memory and storage cards, replacement battery packs, and cables.⁴ It directed buyers to mail or fax the completed form or to call EO's toll-free sales line at 1-800-458-0880.⁴

Two weeks before the letter went out, EO had named Olivetti its strategic European partner, completing a backing alliance that already included AT&T, Matsushita, and Marubeni.⁵ EO then made good on the letter's timetable: on April 21, 1993, it announced that it was shipping the EO 440 in volume from Matsushita's manufacturing plant in Franklin Park, Illinois — already in the hands of more than sixty corporations — and selling it directly to businesses and individuals through the same toll-free number printed on Jerney's order form.⁶

Within months EO moved beyond direct sales: the AT&T-branded EO 440 reached 52 AT&T Phone Center stores in June 1993, with prices starting at $1,999.⁷ In July, EO broadened distribution further, adding direct marketers and resellers including Dell and Merisel.⁸ In August 1993, AT&T — by then EO's majority owner — announced that EO and GO Corp., developer of the PenPoint operating system, would merge into a single AT&T personal-communicator company.⁹ EO, Inc. ceased operations on July 29, 1994, after it was unable to secure the financing needed to bring its next-generation device to market.¹⁰

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes