Worldwide PenPoint Developers Organization (WPDO) Meeting Notice – July 23, 1992

This printed notice announced the July 23, 1992 meeting of the Worldwide PenPoint Developers Organization (WPDO), a Thursday-evening gathering held at GO Corporation's headquarters at 919 East Hillsdale Boulevard, Suite 400, in Foster City, California.¹ The WPDO described itself as an independent nonprofit organization formed to serve the needs of PenPoint developers rather than as a division of GO Corporation, and it stated that it would sponsor monthly meetings at which developers and GO representatives gave technical presentations and answered questions about PenPoint.¹ The notice listed activities then in the planning stages, including a developer newsletter and the distribution of developer tools and sample programs, and it described the organization's intent to establish affiliate chapters throughout the world.¹

The meeting's agenda opened with organizational information and a welcome from Jerry Kaplan, GO's Chairman and co-founder, and continued with technical presentations by GO engineers and a developer question-and-answer session.¹ Admission was free, and attendees were asked to reserve a place through Paul Williams of Pen-squared Computing in Mountain View, California — explicitly not through GO Corporation — preferably by Internet or CompuServe electronic mail.¹ Williams asked each registrant to submit technical questions in advance and to prioritize written feedback for GO Corporation, which the organization said it would accumulate and formally submit to the company.¹

By 1993 the WPDO had grown into a chapter-based organization that served PenPoint developers through information, networking, and representation.² It maintained chapters in Silicon Valley, Boston, St. Louis, and New York City in the United States and in Waterloo, Ontario, and it offered members monthly meetings, newsletters, videotapes and slides of those meetings, developer workshops, and an online bulletin board system carrying sample code, developer tools, newsletter back issues, and a member registry.² Membership in the Silicon Valley chapter cost $95 a year for individuals and $300 a year for corporations.²

The organization published a newsletter, WPDO News, which by its May 1993 issue — Volume 2, Number 3 — appeared under WPDO President David Schachter.³ That issue announced that, through an arrangement with GO Corporation, WPDO members would be able to obtain the PenPoint software developer's kit free of charge, distributed through the WPDO bulletin board and on floppy disks sent to each chapter, and that members were eligible for discounts on GO and Addison-Wesley PenPoint documentation.³ The WPDO also gathered structured feedback from its members, circulating a meeting-improvement questionnaire in February 1993 that asked attendees what they liked and disliked about its meetings and what they would change.⁴

The WPDO recorded its monthly meetings and made them available to members on videotape.⁵ The first tape in that series documented the inaugural WPDO meeting — the gathering this notice announced — and captured Paul Williams's introduction as head of the organization, an address by GO's Jerry Kaplan, an update on GO's developer relations, and a technical presentation by GO engineer Craig Taylor on the GO object model, with the meeting series then continuing on a roughly monthly schedule into 1993.⁵

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes