EO, Inc. – Personal Communicator 440 Letter and Order Form

This letter and order form, dated March 5, 1993, invited its recipient to place an early order for the EO Personal Communicator 440, a wireless handheld device that combined fax, electronic mail, and cellular telephone capabilities.¹ The letter, signed by Bart Adae of EO's Business Development group, enclosed an order form and asked that completed orders be mailed or faxed directly to EO, Inc.¹ It told recipients that EO expected to begin shipping the EO 440 during the second quarter of 1993 and to allow a minimum of eight weeks after receipt of an order before shipment.¹ EO accepted purchase orders, company or personal checks, and money orders but not credit cards, and noted that the device was available to U.S. customers only.¹

The enclosed order form listed the EO Personal Communicator 440 in several configurations, beginning at $1,999 for the model with 4 MB of RAM and rising through versions that added an internal modem, additional memory, and a 20 MB hard disk.² It also offered peripherals and accessories, including a keyboard, an external floppy disk drive, a cellular module, memory expansion cards, and replacement pens and battery packs.² Orders were to be sent to the EO Sales Department at 800A East Middlefield Road in Mountain View, California.²

EO, Inc., had been founded in 1991, and the previous October it announced a partnership with AT&T, Matsushita, and Marubeni to design, build, and market a new class of products it called personal communicators.³ EO unveiled the first of these, the EO Personal Communicator 440 and the larger EO 880, on November 4, 1992; the 2.2-pound EO 440 ran AT&T Microelectronics' Hobbit microprocessor at 20 MHz and used the PenPoint operating system from GO Corp., with its operating system and nine bundled applications stored in ROM.⁴ At its unveiling the EO 440 was priced from $1,999 for the 4 MB model, with broad availability set for the second quarter of 1993.⁴

EO began shipping the EO 440 in volume in April 1993, selling directly to businesses and individuals through a toll-free number as it expanded into other distribution channels.⁵ In June 1993 AT&T and EO announced an agreement that would make AT&T the majority shareholder in EO, and the AT&T-branded EO 440 went on sale in 52 AT&T Phone Centers on June 30, 1993.⁶⁷ EO, Inc., 52 percent owned by AT&T and unable to secure the additional financing needed to bring a next-generation personal communicator to market, ceased operations on July 29, 1994.⁸

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes