Hey Bob.I've got 2 prototype (working) NEC VersaPads (they actually say
NEC Autograph on them). It's was a slick machine, our company
SystemSoft was developing the PCMCIA for NEC. Not to be critical 10
years later, but the NEC VersaPad a lousy implementation of PCMCIA (hot
swapping primarily), but it could have been our early engineering
samples.
The other machine from that era that impressed me was the NCR 3125.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/ncr_3125/
Out of all the pen machine built in 1992-1994, I think the 3125 or the
AT&T Safari machine were the biggest sellers (not that pen machines were
big sellers).
I never realized the VersaPad was never released..or that PenPoint ran
on it. I would love to try it though.
After GO went under I really regret (now) throwing out the PenPoint SDK,
documentation, diskettes etc.
I've an IBM pen computer that runs PenPoint and I really think it was
much better then Windows for Pen Computing by far. I've always wanted a
Momenta pen system - anyone have one? Momenta burned through $40M in VC
money.until the dotcom era, that was the biggest disaster that VCs ever
had.
-Chandra
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Bob Shannon
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 6:41 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.
I
worked for Go shortly before they merged back together with Eo and
then...
"went". --Patrick
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