Talk:PenPoint OS
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PenPoint was and is a Masterpiece in my opinion. Too bad it is nolonger available. Or is it? AT&T seems to have no documentation reguarding this gem. If anyone knows where to look, please point this out.
I would like to thank Mr Kaplan and Mr Carr for bestowing there genius appon us and remind them that it is not forgoten.
- Thanks for the kind words. I think a Taiwanese company bought the intellectual property when GO/EO went under, but did nothing with it, so the O.S. is owned but unavailable. At one of the alumni reunions I met a guy at a small independent software vendor who sold apps based on PenPoint; he had acquired a license for the source code and had made some improvements like limited color support and support on recent tablet computers. In addition to the user-friendly The Power of PenPoint book mentioned in the Wikipedia article, Addison-Wesley published a GO Technical Library including Penpoint Programming ISBN 0201608332. -- Skierpage 06:26, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] TODO: Awards and innovation
The article needs updating with all awards PenPoint won ("Byte Magazine O.S. of the year", umm, ??) and more details of its UI and API innovations:
- large set of gestures like circle tap
- press and hold for copying
- Notebook metaphor (that asshole Microsoft shamelessly ripped off for their paper announcement of Windows for Pen Computering after GO disclosed PenPoint to them).
- really simple document embedding (compared with 600 pages of OLE thanks to the underlying "each document is a directory nested in another document's directory" architecture)
I'd need time to dig up references for all those... I'll paste this section in and see if it survives. -- Skierpage 06:26, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
