Thats the machine!
Its quite rare. Note the bizzare hard drives it uses, a very unusual
form-factor!
If its an early engineering sample, it will be in whats called Soft-mold
plastic, with a shiny texture rather than
the normal NEC finish (so the engineers would have a good excuse for
dropping them).
Are you interested in trying to get PenPoint onto these machines?
Chandra Bajpai wrote:
> Hey Bob...I've got 2 prototype ( work ing) 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
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Sat Oct 05 2002 - 08:48:01 BST