Bob,
Great story. But, I don't think you can take credit for even a small part in
killing PenPoint. What really killed it, in my opinion (and c'mon, dish out
the flames all you lurkers out there, I'm ready for ya), was the engineering
team itself. PenPoint's fatal flaw was that its development was like some
kind of psychotic symphony, with too many conductors, and musicians working
from different sheet music or ignoring the music altogether. The engineers
couldn't stop engineering, and often had conflicting goals and marching
orders, and for the most part, engineering management didn't seem to be able
to get their hands around it, despite some really good people giving it
their best. Even late in "release" cycles there would be major internal
subsystems thrown into the round file and rewritten (killing one bug and
injecting who knows how many others, and sometimes dropping requirements of
other subsystems). The "90%" meeting you referred to was classic Go... get
everybody in one room, twenty, thirty, or more, and try to get them to
agree. As time droned on, the cost of development steadily climbed, cash
slipped away, and the end came with just a slight push from AT&T. Go had
great engineers, but in the absence of sufficient discipline and process,
they made themselves the poster children for the "herding cats" analogy so
often heard in reference to software project management.
My stint there was short. My third week at the company, there was a 50%
layoff. I was spared, for reasons unknown; I should have been among the
first to go. I lasted about five months, and then the rumors began that
AT&T was killing the Hobbit, the processor on which the 440 and 880 were
based. Fatal, no money to retool. I was outta there, just weeks before the
doors closed. I was responsible for GoMail (the modem-based email
link/application), and GoConnect (a LapLink-like PC bridge that presented
your desktop PC's files in the book metaphor in PenPoint). Fun stuff, but
we also ran into our deep-system problems (remember the 63-character
pathname limit? PenPoint borrowed heavily from ancient MS-DOS, internally).
PenPoint (and its applications) were cool beyond belief, truly "killer
apps". Too bad it didn't last. It would really be great on today's
hardware...
My 2p,
Patrick
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org]On
Behalf Of Bob Shannon
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 3:41 PM
To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
Subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
People actually remember Penpoint!
I'm afraid I had a small hand in 'killing' Penpoint.
Back when I worked at NEC, we had done a lot of work on a tablet-based
portable PC called
a VersaPad. The VersaPad was a fairly slick little 486SX based machine
with a paper-white
mono VGA display and a MicroTouch digitizer. It used an active, RF-linked
'pen' stylus with
mouse-like buttons, etc.
You had your choice of operating systems, Microsoft's Windows for Pen
Computing, a hacked
up version of Windows 3.11, or Go's Penpoint, a strange OS that was
centered around the idea of
an electronic book.
I was sent from NEC to Go's offices, along with a BIOS engineer, to assist
Go Inc. in their efforts
to port Penpoint for the VersaPad. Given this assignement, I sat down
with a prototype and a stack
of PenPoint documentation. As strange as Penpoint was (to me) at the
time, I found it easy to learn
despite the gesture-recognisers inability to deal with my nearly
unreadable handwriting style.
But then things got ugly.
The VersaPad had 2 PCMCIA slots, and Penpoint supported an array of smart
card, flash and SRAM
cards. Penpoint had absolutley no concept of a physical volume or device
name, so when you inserted
a PCMCIA card, a small book-like icon appeared on a GUI 'shelf'.
Apparently the VersaPad was the only Penpoint machine that supported 2
PCMCIA slots, something Go
had never forseen in their low-level O/S design. This was a feature
thought to be critical for a major customer
who had asked NEC to develop the strange little VersaPad machine in the
first place.
Turns out I could pop a card into slot 0, and get its icon as normal. I
could then pop a second card into slot
1 and see another 'book' icon appear. But when I removed the first card
and its icon disappeared, the identical
icon for the card in slot 0 slid down the 'shelf' into the position that
had held the icon for the card I'd just removed.
Re-inserting the card in slot 0 now generated an icon on the OPPOSITE side
of the icon for the slot 1 card, so
there was no way to relate either PCMCIA card icon to either physical
slot, as the GUI presentation depended
on the order of insertion. The way this OS worked, with 2 PCMCIA slots,
you were sure to delete files from
the wrong physical volume, or not know which physical bit of media
actually held your data. It was nasty.
When this bug was replicated by the NEC BIOS enginer on the trip with me,
we reported this bizzare bug to Go's team.
Later that day, 90% of the engineers we were sent to support were called
into 'urgent' meetings.
In the end, Go's assesement was that Penpoint would have to be
fundementally re-engineered to fix this issue. The changes needed would be
to dramatic that the project was canceled. This was a bug they just could
not fix, and
without the ability to use a PCMCIA modem and data-card, NEC's customer
for the VersaPad would be forced to abandon the Penpoint application and
retool for a Windows for Pen Computing application. The result of this, and
some really major issues with early Ni-MHD battery cells was enough to kill
the complete VersaPad project.
A few VersaPad's still exist, and I probably even have a copy of Penpoint,
a tragically flawed Penpoint mind you, for these rare beasts. I had a small
stack of VersaPads, and recently sold some at the MIT flea-market to people
wanting to use them as controllers for mobile robots.
If there is any real interest, I'll go dig one out and see if one of the 2
remaining machines has Penpoint still installed.
Anyway, I was not to happy Penpoint went away. I think I would prefer
Penpoint as an O/S for my MobilePro 450 over Windows CE, but it has been a
long time since I've used either one.
Say, how old is a NEC MobilePro anyway? Hmm, nope, thats off-topic!
Patrick Rigney wrote:
On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Patrick Rigney wrote:
Now that's what I call collectible. I really wish I still had
my EO 440...
:-(
I have one ;)Sellam Ismail Vintage
Very cool... is it still working? I'd love to see pix; many memories.
Iworked for Go shortly before they merged back together with Eo and
then..."went". --Patrick
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