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PenPoint OS

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The PenPoint OS was a product of GO Corporation and was one of the earliest operating systems written specifically for graphical tablets and personal digital assistants. It ran on AT&T's EO Personal Communicator as well as a number of Intel x86 powered Tablet PCs including IBM's ThinkPad 700T series, NCR's 3125, and some of GRiD Systems' pen-based portables.

Developers of the PenPoint OS included Robert Carr, who was involved with the Alto computer at Xerox PARC.

Awards and innovation

Byte magazine awarded PenPoint best Operating System in the 1992 Byte Awards. PenPoint won in the Standards and Operating Systems category in PC Magazine's 1991 Technical Excellence awards.[1]

The PenPoint operating system had novel early implementations of several computing advances, including:

  • a large set of gestures such as circle to edit, X to delete, and caret to insert
  • using the same gestures at all levels of the operating system and applications
  • press and hold for moving any selection, which showed the selection as a floating icon to be dropped into a destination
  • a rich notebook user interface metaphor: Documents existed as pages in a notebook with tabs (this was not new in PenPoint, but PenPoint was the first to make it a primary OS interface; Microsoft later did it in Windows for Pen Computing)
  • a document architecture whereby each document could be a directory nested in another document's directory, allowing documents to be embedded in each other.
  • dynamic toolkit layout: this allowed applications to rescale for landscape and portrait orientation
  • a system-wide pluggable address book

In April 2008, as part of a larger federal court case, the gesture features of the Windows/Tablet PC operating system and hardware were found to infringe on a patent by GO Corp. concerning user interfaces for the PenPoint OS.[2]

Third-party applications

The novel user interface of PenPoint and the mobile form factor of pen computers inspired many startup software companies, including:

Further reading

  • Carr, Robert (1991). The power of PenPoint. Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley Pub. Co. ISBN 0-201-57763-1. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Kaplan, Jerry (1994). Startup : a Silicon Valley adventure. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-025731-4.
  • Jennifer Edstrom, Marlin Eller, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, ISBN 0-80-505755-2, Holt, 1999.
  • GO Corporation (1992). PenPoint architectural reference, Volume 1. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0201608596.
  • GO Corporation (1992). PenPoint architectural reference, Volume 2. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 020160860X.
  • GO Corporation (1992). PenPoint user interface design reference. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0201608588.
  • GO Corporation (1992). PenPoint application writing guide. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 020160857X.
  • Novobilski, Andy (1992). PenPoint programming. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0201608332.

References

  1. ^ The 8th Annual Awards (1991) - Standards and Operating Systems, retrieved 2007-04-20
  2. ^ Mintz, Jessica (2008-04-04), Microsoft to Appeal $367M Patent Ruling, The Associated Press, retrieved 2008-09-04 {{citation}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
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