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.

1 Awards and innovation
2 Third-party applications
3 Further reading
4 External links
5 References

[edit] 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
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 where each document was a directory nested in another document's directory (in some sense, this was an extension of the document architecture on Multics)
dynamic toolkit layout: this allowed applications to rescale for landscape and portrait orientation
a system-wide pluggable address book

[edit] Third-party applications

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

FutureWave Software (SmartSketch, a vector-drawing program that evolved into Adobe Flash)
Glyphic Technology (Glyphic Script prototype-based programming language, with Codeworks direct interactive programming environment [1])
PenMagic (Numero spreadsheet and LetterExpress document fill-in templates)
Pensoft (Perspective personal data manager)
Slate (several pen applications). Slate's founders included industry luminaries Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.
Gaia Software (Personal Media personal productivity applications)

[edit] Further reading

R. Carr, D. Shafer, The Power of PenPoint, ISBN 0-201-57763-1, Addison Wesley, 1991.
Jerry Kaplan, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, ISBN 0-14-025731-4, Penguin, 1996.