GO Corporation PenPointers April 1993 (Newsletter)

The April 1993 issue of PenPointers was published by GO Corporation as a developer newsletter for the PenPoint operating system community.

The previous fall, GO had folded its messaging stack — GO Mail, the GO Address Book, an AT&T Mail communication link, and a Dialing Location Sheet — into PenPoint itself as the GO Message Center, with the object-oriented APIs published for third parties and GO Fax announced as the first commercial application built on top.¹ The same day, AT&T EasyLink Services and GO had described a worldwide network that would give every PenPoint user a free link to AT&T Mail and gateway access to more than twenty million electronic mail users in over 160 countries.² Two weeks later GO launched the “Hot Apps” promotion, bundling Ink Development’s InkWare NoteTaker, Pensoft’s Personal Perspective, PenMagic’s Executive Assistant: A Numero Special Edition, Sitka’s PenCentral, and Notable Technologies’ PenCross with PenPoint purchases through GRiD, IBM, NCR, and Samsung for customers buying before December 31, 1992.³

In the same month PenPointers went out, IBM’s PC Company announced the second-generation ThinkPad 710T, an IBM 486SLC/25 MHz pen tablet that could run either PenPoint or PenDOS, with a no-charge trade-in offered to ThinkPad 700T owners who had purchased through the PenAssist developer-assistance program.⁴ Four days later, Communication Intelligence Corp. announced that its Handwriter Recognition System and PenDOS pen operating environment were available worldwide on the ThinkPad 710T through IBM Direct.⁵ Later in the month, EO Inc. announced it was shipping the EO 440 Personal Communicator in volume from Matsushita Electric’s manufacturing plant in Franklin Park, Illinois, with units already in the hands of more than sixty corporations and more than 125 independent software developers committed to building applications for the platform.⁶

On May 24, six companies — Apple, General Magic, GO, Lotus, Microsoft, and Slate — introduced Jot 1.0, an electronic-ink specification led by a Slate-chaired committee and intended to let pen applications exchange handwritten notes, sketches, and signatures across platforms; GO’s vice president of marketing Mike Homer committed to incorporating Jot into PenPoint and GO applications later in 1993.⁷ In June, Fujitsu Personal Systems and GO announced the Developers Dream Kit, a $3,150 bundle pairing Fujitsu’s 325Point pen tablet with PenPoint pre-loaded on a 1.8-inch 42 MB hard disk, Slate’s PenApps Preview, and PenMagic’s Numero 2.0, available from July 1 through September 30 as a single-purchase entry point for VARs and system integrators building vertical-market pen applications.⁸

On June 1, AT&T and EO announced that EO would become AT&T’s personal communicator company, with AT&T taking majority ownership and the EO 440 being rebranded as the AT&T EO 440 for sale through AT&T Phone Centers and authorized EO resellers.⁹ On August 13, AT&T announced that EO and GO Corp. intended to merge into a single company combining AT&T’s Hobbit microprocessor, GO’s PenPoint operating system, and EO’s personal communicator design; the release reported that more than two thousand software developers were trained and working on PenPoint products, and GO president Bill Campbell would join the EO board to help integrate the software-development functions and personnel into the merged company.¹⁰

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes