January 27, 1991

A PARTICULARLY muscular gust of fresh air blew open the windows in the personal computer industry’s musty halls last week when Go Corp. unveiled a gorgeous new operating system for pen-based computers on Tuesday in San Francisco.

A pen-based computer, also called a “notebook” computer, is one that uses a stylus for input. What’s gorgeous about Go’s PenPoint system is that it isn’t a baling-wire-and-chewing-gum solution to the problems that people face when work takes them away from a wall socket or a desktop.

PenPoint was designed specifically to let users hold their computer in one hand and write on it with the other, in the same way that people use a clipboard and pen.

So instead of typing commands or clicking on buttons with a mouse, PenPoint is what’s called “gesture-driven” ˆ to make the computer do something, a user marks on the screen itself with gestures common to anyone familiar with putting pen to paper: documents are numbered by pages, arrows move those pages up or down, an “X” or a line through a word deletes it, a circle makes it editable, etc.

The system recognizes handwriting, but isn’t designed for long handwritten notes. Since handwriting is as individual as a fingerprint, training a computer to read it is a monumental task, years from perfection. So Go-based applications aren’t centered on input-intensive office automation. Instead, they’re designed for mobile users who send and receive faxes, fill out forms, do inventory reports and need mostly to refer to data, not generate it.

This is an revolutionary way to compute, and one that Foster City-based Go hopes will open a whole new market. Common wisdom is that only about 30 percent of the people who could use a computer, do; either they don’t sit at a desk all day or they work in groups.

PenPoint blew in with enormous support, not surprising from a team that helped start the early PC revolution. Two of Go’s founders, Jerry Kaplan and Robert Carr, were, respectively, principal technologist at Lotus Development and chief scientist at Ashton-Tate. Some 40 companies, liberally sprinkled with other PC pioneers, announced PenPoint projects already underway.

IBM Corp. has licensed the system for an upcoming machine. Apple Computer, widely known to be building its own notebook computer, sent a noticeable number of attendees. Despite its historical NIH policy (“Not invented here? Not interested”), it’s obvious Apple is seriously considering PenPoint, if it hasn’t already decided.

Despite wide support and elegant technology, Go has a tough row to hoe. Microsoft Corp., the reigning leader in PC operating systems with DOS and Windows, has been peddling a demo of its very own pen-based operating system, PenWindows, around town ˆ hot on the heels of Go. (Microsoft is sprouting a nasty reputation in the industry for such pre-emptive strikes. Developers call it “the evil empire,” and they have a name for chairman Bill Gates, too ˆ but more on that another time.)

PenWindows is an extension of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and some people think this fact alone is sufficient to quash Go and PenPoint. Those who’ve seen it say that it looks “just like” Windows. This doesn’t seem like much of a feature to me.

The point, pardon the pun, is not to stick old applications into a notebook, but to give entree into the world of computing to people who don’t know and don’t care about word processors or spreadsheets.

In fact, Rich Shapero, president of Sitka Corp. in Alameda, believes the utopian dream of “one world, one operating system” has begun to rankle: a flood of portable or special-purpose computing devices is already on the way, so diverse that no one company could possibly support them all. Sitka just announced a PenPoint version of its Tops cross-platform network, so there’s good reason for him to think (albeit self-servingly, I’ll admit) the network itself will provide the connections between them.

“Go is the tip of the iceberg,”‘ says Shapero. “The end is not to restrict the applications, but to free them to be as specialized as they want to be.”