aha! software corporation

aha! software corporation was founded in early 1991 and based in Mountain View, California, with Gregory Stikeleather as president and chief executive officer.¹ The company first surfaced publicly in November 1992 when AT&T Microelectronics announced industry support for its Hobbit microprocessor and listed aha! as one of fourteen software companies committed to building productivity applications for Hobbit-based personal communicators.²

On June 14, 1993, aha! announced its first product, InkWriter, the inaugural title in what the company called its InkProcessor product line.¹ InkWriter ran on GO Corporation's PenPoint operating system on both the 386/486 and AT&T Hobbit microprocessor families, and was built on aha!'s patent-pending SmartInk technology, which let users write in electronic ink and then edit that handwriting with the operations of a word processor — deleting words and seeing the surrounding handwriting word-wrap to close the gap, without first translating the ink into computer text.¹ The product carried a suggested retail price of $249 and was scheduled to ship in July 1993.¹

That October, EO Inc. and a group of top PenPoint independent software vendors — aha!, Notable Technologies, PenMagic Software, Pensoft, and Deskin Research Group — kicked off a six-city nationwide seminar tour in Los Angeles to showcase software applications for the AT&T/EO Personal Communicator platform.³ On June 10, 1994, aha! released InkWriter for Windows at a suggested list price of $199.⁴

On September 28, 1994, aha! announced an InkWriter version for Sony's Magic Link communicator and other Magic Cap-based devices, available directly from Sony at a suggested list price of $129.⁵ Days later, on October 10, 1994, Fujitsu announced that a 30-day evaluation version of InkWriter would ship with its new Stylistic 500 tablet computer, with Fujitsu Personal Systems executive vice president Lou Panetta calling it "the best software there is for taking notes with mobile-computing hardware."⁶ The Magic Cap version of InkWriter began shipping directly from Sony on June 1, 1995.⁷

On January 18, 1995, Mobile Computing Insights nominated aha! InkWriter in the Systems category of its inaugural Mobility Awards, presented at Mobile Insights '95 in Scottsdale, Arizona.⁸ That spring, Fujitsu was selected to supply its Stylistic 500 tablet — running InkWriter and SMART Technologies' SMART 2000 conferencing software, integrated by Toronto-based VAR Filbitron — for use by the delegations of the Group of Seven leaders and their research teams at the Halifax Economic Summit held June 15-17, 1995.⁹¹⁰

On April 8, 1996, Microsoft Corp. announced a definitive agreement to acquire aha! software; financial terms were not disclosed.¹¹ Paul Maritz, group vice president of the platforms group at Microsoft, said aha! had "come up with a very innovative way to deal with the handwriting recognition problem by manipulating handwriting in its ink form as though it were actual computer text."¹¹

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes