GO Corporation PenPoint Quick Reference

The PenPoint Quick Reference is a printed quick-reference guide produced by GO Corporation for its PenPoint operating system, dated 1992 and organized into four numbered sections.¹ GO Corporation commercially released PenPoint on April 16, 1992, a 32-bit, preemptive-multitasking operating system designed for mobile pen computing in which the user works much as with pen and paper in an ordinary notebook — writing, scribbling, and taking notes.²

The first section documents PenPoint's pen gestures — the strokes used to select, delete, insert space, capitalize, and edit text — alongside the Notebook interface and its table of contents, page tabs, and page numbers.¹ Applications in PenPoint were integrated through this single Notebook User Interface, so that users moved between documents and applications by turning pages rather than by navigating files or directories.²

The second and third sections cover creating and using documents — floating and embedded documents, the on-screen keyboard, scrolling, and writing and formatting text in the notebook — together with utilities for spelling, find-and-replace, and printing.¹ The release of PenPoint introduced a new handwriting engine, GOWrite, and on-line help facilities including Quick Help, which displayed a context-sensitive description when the user drew a question mark over an item on screen.²

The fourth section is devoted to MiniNote, PenPoint's note-taking application, and the gestures used to edit handwritten and drawn notes within it; one of the card's example screens shows a MiniNote page dated September 13, 1992.¹

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes