Talk:PenPoint OS

Latest comment: 2 years ago by Wesleyneo in topic TODO: Awards and innovation

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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)Reply

Actually it was not purchased by a Taiwanese company, though commonly thought so for good reason. In 1994 ITRI (a Tiawanese Industrial consortium) initially agreed to purchase EO's intellectual property, and in fact hired many former EO/GO employees to train their engineers for the technology transfer. Though the technology transfer completed, the deal never did. In the meantime former developers were negotiating with EO's CEO Bob Evans to release all the the code to open source. This may have happened if no other licensees came to the table, but at least one did, that person you met at the alumni meeting, and went quite a long way with it. The company was called Mobilepoint, and I worked there for several years making it happen (and oh yes, I remember many years earlier, getting a lot of help learning to develop on this great OS from an awesome developer support person named S Page ;-) BTW, the original source code and subsequent versions is available, though it might take quite awhile to figure out licensing with its current owners. Even today, there might be some relevancy to its study especially on low-end products concepts such as electronic paper displays that E Ink is supporting. Wanderbookman (talk) 08:12, 10 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

TODO: Awards and innovation

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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)Reply

Hey, I have listed a few articles from BYTE. Hope they are helpful. - wneo (talk) 09:10, 26 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

BYTE

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Hope this helps editors with references. - wneo (talk) 16:17, 25 March 2022 (UTC)Reply