GO Corporation – GO Fax Brochure

The GO Fax brochure is marketing collateral GO Corporation packaged into its 1992 Media Kit to promote the company’s first commercially available end-user application — a Group 3 fax program built on top of the PenPoint operating system. The new phone number stamped on the back cover indicates the brochure was repurposed rather than reprinted.

GO Fax was announced on October 26, 1992, alongside the GO Message Center — a set of object-oriented messaging components (GO Mail, AT&T Mail link, GO Address Book, Dialing Location Sheet) bundled as a standard part of PenPoint.¹ The application was priced at $199 and shipped in the fourth quarter of 1992. The same day, AT&T EasyLink Services announced its complementary messaging link, tying PenPoint users into a worldwide network that bridged through to roughly twenty million existing email users via AT&T Mail.²

GO Fax let a mobile PenPoint user send and receive Group 3 faxes from a tablet computer using an electronic fax cover sheet, communicate with standard fax machines and PCs with fax boards, draw on the system-wide GO Address Book for recipients, and use PenPoint’s “deferred connectivity” — its system-wide In box and Out box — to queue outgoing faxes when no phone line was available and dispatch them automatically the moment the device reconnected.¹

Bill Campbell, who had taken over as CEO in January 1991, spent 1992 pitching PenPoint as the operating system for what AT&T was calling a “Personal Communicator” — a class of mobile, communications-oriented device built around AT&T Microelectronics’ Hobbit RISC processor and announced earlier that July.³ The IBM ThinkPad shipped on April 16, 1992 as the first commercial pen-based computer running PenPoint, and came with an integrated data/fax modem.⁴

Less than two weeks after the GO Fax announcement, EO Inc. unveiled the EO 440 and EO 880 Personal Communicators on November 4, 1992 — devices that ran PenPoint, used AT&T’s Hobbit processor, included 9600-bps send-and-receive fax capability, and bundled nine applications in ROM.⁵

On August 13, 1993 — less than a year after GO Fax shipped — AT&T announced that EO and GO would merge into a single company under AT&T’s ownership, with Bill Campbell joining EO’s board to oversee the integration.⁶ The GO Message Center components survived into the AT&T EO Personal Communicator product line, and a follow-on Novell MHS link for GO Mail shipped at $149 in September 1993 to extend reach into corporate email systems.⁷

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes