GO Corporation PenPointers November 1992 (Newsletter)

The November 1992 issue of PenPointers, GO Corporation's newsletter for PenPoint developers, led with the announcement of the GO Message Center.¹ GO had publicly disclosed the Message Center on Monday, October 26, 1992, presenting it as a tightly integrated set of object-oriented messaging components that would ship as a standard part of the PenPoint mobile operating system.² The components bundled GO Mail, a full-featured electronic mail engine and universal messaging interface; an AT&T Mail communication link; a system-wide GO Address Book accessible from any PenPoint application; and a Dialing Location sheet, and GO simultaneously introduced GO Fax, the first commercially available application built on the Message Center, at a suggested list price of $199 and availability in the fourth quarter of 1992.² The newsletter described GO Mail as transport-independent, connecting to messaging networks through software modules called communication links and providing a single front end for electronic mail, fax, and paging.¹ It told developers that the GO Message Center would be included with upcoming versions of the PenPoint operating system and software developer's kit in 1993, with a Message Center briefing to be scheduled before the end of the year.¹

The AT&T Mail link grew out of a separate agreement GO and AT&T EasyLink Services had announced the same day, under which every PenPoint user would eventually be tied to AT&T's public messaging network and its more than 20 million electronic mail users in over 160 countries.³ PenPoint users would receive the AT&T Mail communication link free, paying only for messages they sent or information services they accessed.³ The issue enclosed AT&T's October 12 press release and an AT&T Hobbit brochure prepared for COMDEX, answering developer questions about AT&T and the Hobbit processor.¹ AT&T Microelectronics and GO had made that development relationship public in July 1992, agreeing to optimize PenPoint for AT&T's new Hobbit line of low-power RISC microprocessors aimed at the emerging personal communicator market.⁴

That market had taken shape over the preceding weeks: on November 4, 1992, EO Inc. unveiled the world's first personal communicators, the EO Personal Communicator 440 and 880, both built around the Hobbit processor and the PenPoint operating system.⁵ AT&T followed on November 16, 1992, announcing that it would market the AT&T Personal Communicator 440 — designed and supplied by EO — through its Phone Centers in early 1993.⁶ The newsletter's seminar calendar previewed this hardware directly, scheduling a November 12 talk by EO's and AT&T Microelectronics' ISV marketing managers on developing software for the EO/AT&T Personal Communicator.¹

For COMDEX/Fall '92, the newsletter announced that GO would host a conference room — N110 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which it called the Center for Mobile Computing — where it would demonstrate PenPoint alongside third-party developers.¹ GO planned to show some of its messaging products publicly for the first time at the show, along with the Japanese version of PenPoint.¹

The issue also reported on the first Pen Computing Conference, hosted by the Software Council of Southern California and PenUltimate in Long Beach on October 28, 1992, which opened with a talk by Slate Corporation president Tom Byers and closed with a keynote by GO co-founder and vice president of software development Robert Carr.¹ It announced a Unicode Implementors Workshop to be held in Europe on December 3 and 4, 1992, noting that future versions of PenPoint would implement the Unicode standard.¹ The San Francisco Bay Area WPDO chapter's seminar calendar also listed a December session on programming under PenPoint and a January 1993 talk on cursive handwriting recognition by Lexicus chief executive Ranjan Nag.¹

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes