PenPoint OS

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 Corporation's EO Personal Communicator as well as a number of Intel x86 powered tablet PCs including IBM's ThinkPad 700T series, NCR's 3125, 3130 and some of GRiD Systems' pen-based portables. It was never widely adopted.

Developers of the PenPoint OS included Robert Carr, who was involved with the Alto computer at Xerox PARC. He commissioned Dr. Tinker, the naming service company of Mark Beaulieu who generated the name 'PenPoint', using proprietary algorithms.

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.

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

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.

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

...
Wikipedia