3 Oct
2002
3 Oct
'02
6:29 a.m.
Well, as to not accepting x86-machines, then would that rule out NetFrames?
Those things rock, running Netware SMP or Windows NT.. Fault-tolerant too...
And though it isn't 10 yet, what about my Sequent? Would the fact it runs
Pentium-66s disqualify it? I think I agree with Sellam, in that so long as
it doesn't turn into a Windows support forum its OK... Would be good not to
have basic PC questions either, unless they're for say 5150s or for the
"sort-of-compatible" early clones..
Will J
_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
3 Oct
3 Oct
9:22 a.m.
Lets face it, PC's have been around a while now, and they are not going
away any time soon.
But how 'classic' is any machine that was so highly mass-produced? The
sheer numbers make them so common, their
collectable 'value' will be nearly zero, unless they are unusual in some
way.
So highly customized PC's, or specialized machines (i.e. EISA bus) may
hold more interest than your standard PCI based Pentiums, which are
about as collectable as a 10 year old toaster.
But there are some 'interesting' things out there in PC land, strange
things that never made it into mass production, like Intel P54CBT's, or
extinct operating systems like PenPoint.
Older machines, like minicomputers from back when all machines had a
front panel, had very unique and recognisable styles. The gold plating
of HP gear, the near military qualitiy (and tank-like nature) of Unibus
machines, or the no-nonsense practicality of a Nova, each made a clear
statement about the design philosophy of their makers.
PC's simply lack this, being a commodity product (exactly like a toaster).
So yes, Windows 95 will become a 'classic' O/S. So what, that will not
make it any more interesting. This of it this way, the era of
recognisable computer design philosophy ended, some time ago. This only
makes the value of really ANTIQUE computers much higher than mearly
'vintage' computers.
To my eye, an interesting machine its not really a matter of being more
than 10 years old, its a matter of having been made with a unique design
style. It just so happens that once upon a time, all computers were
made this way.
Will Jennings wrote:
Well, as to not accepting x86-machines, then would
that rule out
NetFrames? Those things rock, running Netware SMP or Windows NT..
Fault-tolerant too... And though it isn't 10 yet, what about my
Sequent? Would the fact it runs Pentium-66s disqualify it? I think I
agree with Sellam, in that so long as it doesn't turn into a Windows
support forum its OK... Would be good not to have basic PC questions
either, unless they're for say 5150s or for the "sort-of-compatible"
early clones..
Will J
_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
10:46 a.m.
I feel that the BeBox fit's that category. An orphan OS, unusual design
(dual PPC, not a Mac, PC conponent's, case color, and don't forget the
blinkin lights). The last BeBoxs won't be 10 years old until 2008. The
original Grid laptops with magnesium cases and oil field equipment
rugged design are another. The first Grids not the Tandy Grids are
already included in the 10 year rule I think.
James
Bob Shannon wrote:
Lets face it, PC's have been around a while now,
and they are not going
away any time soon.
But how 'classic' is any machine that was so highly mass-produced? The
sheer numbers make them so common, their
collectable 'value' will be nearly zero, unless they are unusual in some
way.
So highly customized PC's, or specialized machines (i.e. EISA bus) may
hold more interest than your standard PCI based Pentiums, which are
about as collectable as a 10 year old toaster.
But there are some 'interesting' things out there in PC land, strange
things that never made it into mass production, like Intel P54CBT's, or
extinct operating systems like PenPoint.
http://webpages.charter.net/jrice54/classiccomp2.html
1:46 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great James Rice once stated:
I feel that the BeBox fit's that category. An orphan OS, unusual design
(dual PPC, not a Mac, PC conponent's, case color, and don't forget the
blinkin lights). The last BeBoxs won't be 10 years old until 2008.
I don't think it's quite that young---I think they first came out in '95
or '96. I remember at the time that my partner (and boss) was planning on
getting me one if I finished a project on time (which I didn't, but that's
another story).
-spc (Looked like a cool box at the time ... )
3:44 p.m.
On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Bob Shannon wrote:
So highly customized PC's, or specialized machines
(i.e. EISA bus) may
hold more interest than your standard PCI based Pentiums, which are
about as collectable as a 10 year old toaster.
You spoke too soon:
The Toaster Museum Foundation
http://www.toaster.org
But there are some 'interesting' things out
there in PC land, strange
things that never made it into mass production, like Intel P54CBT's, or
extinct operating systems like PenPoint.
PenPoint is definitely something worthy of collecting and discussing.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
5:35 p.m.
Sellam,
Now that's what I call collectible. I really wish I still had my EO 440...
:-(
Patrick
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-admin(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]On
Behalf Of Sellam Ismail
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2002 5:46 PM
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: 10 years
On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Bob Shannon wrote:
www.VintageTech.com *
So highly customized PC's, or specialized
machines (i.e. EISA bus) may
hold more interest than your standard PCI based Pentiums, which are
about as collectable as a 10 year old toaster.
You spoke too soon:
The Toaster Museum Foundation
http://www.toaster.org
But there are some 'interesting' things
out there in PC land, strange
things that never made it into mass production, like Intel P54CBT's, or
extinct operating systems like PenPoint.
PenPoint is definitely something worthy of collecting and discussing.
Sellam Ismail Vintage
Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger
http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at
6:04 p.m.
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 Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
4 Oct
4 Oct
8:34 a.m.
On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Patrick Rigney wrote:
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
Now that's what I call collectible. I really
wish I still had
my EO 440...
:-(
I have one ;)
Sellam Ismail Vintage
1:38 p.m.
New 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:
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
Now that's what I call collectible. I really
wish I still had
my EO 440...
:-(
I have one ;)
Sellam Ismail Vintage
3:15 p.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Bob Shannon wrote:
You had your choice of operating systems,
Microsoft's Windows for
Pen Computing,
I have a Samsung "tablet" PC that runs this little-known version
of Windows. I think it's from 1993, so nearly on-topic. I used
it a year or two ago to show my students some alternative interface
designs. It had a configuration option for landscape or portrait
display, although some applications failed when in portrait mode.
--
John Honniball
coredump(a)gifford.co.uk
3:35 p.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
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(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]On
Behalf Of Bob Shannon
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 3:41 PM
To: cctalk(a)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
5:08 p.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Bob,
Is this machine related to the pen top Fujitsu computer? I have one but haven't
used it in a while. The dammed batteries are about worthless in it, they go dead in a few
days even with the machine off. Anyway mine has two (IIRC) PCMCIA slots and runs the pen
version of Win 3.1. It's actually a pretty neat machine, you can detach the keyboard
completely and run everything via the pen. Also it has SRAM for memory so you can turn it
off then turn it back on and everything is exactly the way that you left it.
I THINK I remember reading that this machine would support PenPoint but I've never
seen a copy of it.
Joe
At 06:41 PM 10/4/02 -0400, you wrote:
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:
Attachment Converted: "C:\EUDORA\Attach\Penpoint.htm"
On Thu, 3
Oct 2002, Patrick Rigney wrote:
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
Now that's what I call collectible. I really
wish I still had
my EO 440...
:-(
I have one ;)
Sellam Ismail Vintage
6:56 p.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Joe wrote:
Is this machine related to the pen top Fujitsu
computer? I have one but
haven't used it in a while. The dammed batteries are about worthless in
it, they go dead in a few days even with the machine off. Anyway mine
has two (IIRC) PCMCIA slots and runs the pen version of Win 3.1. It's
actually a pretty neat machine, you can detach the keyboard completely
and run everything via the pen. Also it has SRAM for memory so you can
turn it off then turn it back on and everything is exactly the way that
you left it.
I THINK I remember reading that this machine would support PenPoint but
I've never seen a copy of it.
IIRC, Alan Cox is currently working on getting the Linux kernel to play
nice with one of those Fujitsu computers. Maybe once thats all polished
it'll be a little more fun than win3.1?
-Toth
5 Oct
5 Oct
4:51 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
I've got a PenCentra 130 with windows CE and it's a pretty cool tablet.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tothwolf" <tothwolf(a)concentric.net>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 11:09 PM
Subject: Re: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Joe wrote:
Is this machine related to the pen top Fujitsu
computer? I have one but
haven't used it in a while. The dammed batteries are about worthless in
it, they go dead in a few days even with the machine off. Anyway mine
has two (IIRC) PCMCIA slots and runs the pen version of Win 3.1. It's
actually a pretty neat machine, you can detach the keyboard completely
and run everything via the pen. Also it has SRAM for memory so you can
turn it off then turn it back on and everything is exactly the way that
you left it.
I THINK I remember reading that this machine would support PenPoint but
I've never seen a copy of it.
IIRC, Alan Cox is currently working on getting the Linux kernel to play
nice with one of those Fujitsu computers. Maybe once thats all polished
it'll be a little more fun than win3.1?
-Toth
4:45 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
NEC VersaPad was based on a standard WinTel laptop design.
They simply re-packaged it, eliminating the conventional clambshell
chassis and keyboard.
The LCD was the replaced with one having the Microtouch digitizer, and
an internal serial
port was dedicated to talking to the MicroTouch controller, some sort of
8051 I think.
So it dod not borrow any design from Fujitsu, but the very early NiMHD
cells were from Fujitsu
if I recall correctly. These were a disaster, a total disaster, very
very unsafe cells.
If your Fuji laptop has these old Ni-MHD cells, REMOVE then ASAP.
What happens is this, the electrolyte is unstable in some portions of
its charge cycle, and the battery
control electronics accumulate error in this percentage of charge
calculations (because the cell voltage
does not change during charge/discharge very much).
So once the calculated charge value is wrong, it begins to overcharge
the cells slightly, and this
causes the electrolyte to begin to form metal crystals (nickel if I
recall correctly). These tiny, sharp
crystals begin to perforate the semi-permiable ion membrane inside the
cells.
In this condition, the cells become very unstable. They can start fires
if your charger is stupid enough, it
does not take much once the cells are screwed up.
My advice it to remove the cells from your battery pack if you suspect
they are early Ni-MHD technology.
Joe wrote:
Bob,
Is this machine related to the pen top Fujitsu computer? I have one but haven't
used it in a while. The dammed batteries are about worthless in it, they go dead in a few
days even with the machine off. Anyway mine has two (IIRC) PCMCIA slots and runs the pen
version of Win 3.1. It's actually a pretty neat machine, you can detach the keyboard
completely and run everything via the pen. Also it has SRAM for memory so you can turn it
off then turn it back on and everything is exactly the way that you left it.
I THINK I remember reading that this machine would support PenPoint but I've never
seen a copy of it.
Joe
At 06:41 PM 10/4/02 -0400, you wrote:
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:
Attachment Converted: "C:\EUDORA\Attach\Penpoint.htm"
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
5:11 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Thanks for the tip Bob. Mine does still have the original cells in it. Can they be
replaced with standard NiMD cells or is the charging cycle wrong for them?
Do you know if Fujitsu ever recalled or replaced the original cells?
Joe
At 09:48 AM 10/5/02 -0400, you wrote:
NEC VersaPad was based on a standard WinTel laptop
design.
They simply re-packaged it, eliminating the conventional clambshell
chassis and keyboard.
The LCD was the replaced with one having the Microtouch digitizer, and
an internal serial
port was dedicated to talking to the MicroTouch controller, some sort of
8051 I think.
So it dod not borrow any design from Fujitsu, but the very early NiMHD
cells were from Fujitsu
if I recall correctly. These were a disaster, a total disaster, very
very unsafe cells.
If your Fuji laptop has these old Ni-MHD cells, REMOVE then ASAP.
What happens is this, the electrolyte is unstable in some portions of
its charge cycle, and the battery
control electronics accumulate error in this percentage of charge
calculations (because the cell voltage
does not change during charge/discharge very much).
So once the calculated charge value is wrong, it begins to overcharge
the cells slightly, and this
causes the electrolyte to begin to form metal crystals (nickel if I
recall correctly). These tiny, sharp
crystals begin to perforate the semi-permiable ion membrane inside the
cells.
In this condition, the cells become very unstable. They can start fires
if your charger is stupid enough, it
does not take much once the cells are screwed up.
My advice it to remove the cells from your battery pack if you suspect
they are early Ni-MHD technology.
Joe wrote:
Bob,
Is this machine related to the pen top Fujitsu computer? I have one but haven't
used it in a while. The dammed batteries are about worthless in it, they go dead in a few
days even with the machine off. Anyway mine has two (IIRC) PCMCIA slots and runs the pen
version of Win 3.1. It's actually a pretty neat machine, you can detach the keyboard
completely and run everything via the pen. Also it has SRAM for memory so you can turn it
off then turn it back on and everything is exactly the way that you left it.
I THINK I remember reading that this machine would support PenPoint but I've never
seen a copy of it.
Joe
At 06:41 PM 10/4/02 -0400, you wrote:
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
Attachment Converted: "C:\EUDORA\Attach\Penpoint.htm"
5:32 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Modern NI-MHD cells should work fine, as long as you get the correct mAH
rating so the battery
guage works properly.
Also, try to fully charge and discharge the cells on each cycle, partial
charge cycles will accumulate error
much faster than any other activity.
Often you can replace older NI-MHD cells with high quality Ni-CD cells,
again matching the capacity.
This is generally 'safer', although Ni-MHD cells ARE greatly superior to
Ni-CD cells.
Just don't try to mess around with Li-Ion cells or packs. These can
really explode, bigtime!
Joe wrote:
Thanks for the tip Bob. Mine does still have the
original cells in it. Can they be replaced with standard NiMD cells or is the charging
cycle wrong for them?
Do you know if Fujitsu ever recalled or replaced the original cells?
Joe
At 09:48 AM 10/5/02 -0400, you wrote:
NEC VersaPad was based on a standard WinTel laptop
design.
They simply re-packaged it, eliminating the conventional clambshell
chassis and keyboard.
The LCD was the replaced with one having the Microtouch digitizer, and
an internal serial
port was dedicated to talking to the MicroTouch controller, some sort of
8051 I think.
So it dod not borrow any design from Fujitsu, but the very early NiMHD
cells were from Fujitsu
if I recall correctly. These were a disaster, a total disaster, very
very unsafe cells.
If your Fuji laptop has these old Ni-MHD cells, REMOVE then ASAP.
What happens is this, the electrolyte is unstable in some portions of
its charge cycle, and the battery
control electronics accumulate error in this percentage of charge
calculations (because the cell voltage
does not change during charge/discharge very much).
So once the calculated charge value is wrong, it begins to overcharge
the cells slightly, and this
causes the electrolyte to begin to form metal crystals (nickel if I
recall correctly). These tiny, sharp
crystals begin to perforate the semi-permiable ion membrane inside the
cells.
In this condition, the cells become very unstable. They can start fires
if your charger is stupid enough, it
does not take much once the cells are screwed up.
My advice it to remove the cells from your battery pack if you suspect
they are early Ni-MHD technology.
Joe wrote:
Bob,
Is this machine related to the pen top Fujitsu computer? I have one but haven't
used it in a while. The dammed batteries are about worthless in it, they go dead in a few
days even with the machine off. Anyway mine has two (IIRC) PCMCIA slots and runs the pen
version of Win 3.1. It's actually a pretty neat machine, you can detach the keyboard
completely and run everything via the pen. Also it has SRAM for memory so you can turn it
off then turn it back on and everything is exactly the way that you left it.
I THINK I remember reading that this machine would support PenPoint but I've never
seen a copy of it.
Joe
At 06:41 PM 10/4/02 -0400, you wrote:
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
>
>
>
Attachment Converted: "C:\EUDORA\Attach\Penpoint.htm"
10:27 a.m.
New subject: Any Altos fans out there?
I have an Altos Series 5-15, its a dual 5.25" floppy based Z80 system.
It used to run MPM-II, and had
always been a reliable little box. No front pannels or expansion slots,
just a reliable 'appliance' computer
from the pre-PC days. Bank-switched memory too, I
forget how much RAM
is in the thing.
The floppy drives in their day were rather advanced, with about 720K of
storage each. As long as you
used high-quality media, they were rock solid.
Recently I dusted off the old Altos, and after years of disuse I'd like
to get it running again, but I've got
two problems.
First off, on reset the machine will seek track 0 on drive 0, and if
that drive is already at track 0 it quickly
selects drive 1 and attempts the same thing. The problem is that it
never un-selects drive 1, so it does not
even attempt to boot from a disk in drive 0.
If I were to guess, I'd have to say the track 0 sensor in drive 1 is
shot. Should be easy enough to test, but
then I run into problem #2. I can't find the manuals for this box.
They are here, somewhere. Hidden in some box guarded by oversized
spiders probably. Eeek. I'll find them eventually.
Looking at the Vintage links, I was supprized there are no Altos sites.
I seem to recall Altos being a rather well
respected name back then. They did make a pretty decent box in their
day, and I'd thought they sold rather well.
But they sure don't seem to turn up in any on-line collections.
Can anyone tell me where I need to be looking on the floppy disk bus to
find the track 0 signal? Is this a open
collector signal that is shared for all drives on the bus, etc?
Does anyone have a pointer to the general history of Altos? Whatever
happend to them?
9:23 p.m.
New subject: Any Altos fans out there?
On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Bob Shannon wrote:
Looking at the Vintage links, I was supprized there
are no Altos sites.
I seem to recall Altos being a rather well
respected name back then. They did make a pretty decent box in their
day, and I'd thought they sold rather well.
They are definitely plentiful out in the wild. I think the problem is
that they are so damn boring for the most part that no collectors or
hobbysists really thought to devote any time to a page honoring their
service. Perhaps you should put one up? :)
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
4 Oct
4 Oct
6:05 p.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
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(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Bob Shannon
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 6:41 PM
To: cctalk(a)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
5 Oct
5 Oct
4:48 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
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(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Bob Shannon
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 6:41 PM
To: cctalk(a)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:
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
Now that's what I call collectible. I really
wish I still had
my EO 440...
:-(
I have one ;)
Sellam Ismail Vintage
4:48 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Chandra Bajpai wrote:
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.
I've got a Momenta as well. Very odd shaped wedge design.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
8 Oct
8 Oct
4:16 p.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Speaking of pen-based machines, I think I have an IBM ThinkPad 710T
squirreled away somewhere.
Peace... Sridhar
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Chandra Bajpai wrote:
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(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Bob Shannon
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 6:41 PM
To: cctalk(a)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
4 Oct
4 Oct
10:34 p.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Shannon
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 11:41 PM
Subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
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.
OMG... I remember seeing a tablet-based machine in a computer store a few years ago, when
486 SX/25s were still "top of the range" as far as laptops were concerned. A
fast-talking salesman walked up to my Mum and then proceeded to demo a rather nice
tablet-based PC, followed by a very nice Samsung NoteMaster laptop. I told my Mum to get
the tablet PC. She said "The laptop's better". Guess which one she ended up
buying... Yup. A Samsung NoteMaster 486S/25N. As proprietary as hell - Samsung BIOS,
proprietary hard drive, floppy drive, RAM, name it. And now the 3.6V lithium battery is
duff. And to top it all off, Tadiran (original manufacturer) don't make another one
like it. And I'm trading her my Compaq Contura 420C (after I put Win3.1 and Word 6 on
it) for it. Why do I get the feeling I'm making a huge mistake?
5 Oct
5 Oct
4:50 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Sure, I'll sell you a VersaPad!
Philip Pemberton wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From:Bob Shannon <mailto:bshannon@tiac.net>
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 11:41 PM
Subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
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.
OMG... I remember seeing a tablet-based machine in a computer store a
few years ago, when 486 SX/25s were still "top of the range" as far as
laptops were concerned. A fast-talking salesman walked up to my Mum
and then proceeded to demo a rather nice tablet-based PC, followed by
a very nice Samsung NoteMaster laptop. I told my Mum to get the tablet
PC. She said "The laptop's better". Guess which one she ended up
buying... Yup. A Samsung NoteMaster 486S/25N. As proprietary as hell -
Samsung BIOS, proprietary hard drive, floppy drive, RAM, name it. And
now the 3.6V lithium battery is duff. And to top it all off, Tadiran
(original manufacturer) don't make another one like it. And I'm
trading her my Compaq Contura 420C (after I put Win3.1 and Word 6 on
it) for it. Why do I get the feeling I'm making a huge mistake?
From what I remember, the tablet PC had a 486 CPU, 8MB RAM and a 7" or
so touch-sensitive screen you had to touch with a stylus. Oh, and it
ran Pen Windows. And it was black. And IIRC it had a pull-out keyboard.
BTW, anyone got a tablet based PC they feel like parting with? I'd
love to get one simply to recapture some of the childhood I lost when
my Mum chose the laptop over the tablet PC.
Later.
--
Phil.
philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com <mailto:philpem@dsl.pipex.com>
http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/
4:59 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Anyone else that has one of these for sale email me off list with your
asking price. Thanks jrkeys(a)concentric.net
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Shannon" <bshannon(a)tiac.net>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 8:53 AM
Subject: Re: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Sure, I'll sell you a VersaPad!
Philip Pemberton wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From:Bob Shannon <mailto:bshannon@tiac.net>
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 11:41 PM
Subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
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.
OMG... I remember seeing a tablet-based machine in a computer store a
few years ago, when 486 SX/25s were still "top of the range" as far as
laptops were concerned. A fast-talking salesman walked up to my Mum
and then proceeded to demo a rather nice tablet-based PC, followed by
a very nice Samsung NoteMaster laptop. I told my Mum to get the tablet
PC. She said "The laptop's better". Guess which one she ended up
buying... Yup. A Samsung NoteMaster 486S/25N. As proprietary as hell -
Samsung BIOS, proprietary hard drive, floppy drive, RAM, name it. And
now the 3.6V lithium battery is duff. And to top it all off, Tadiran
(original manufacturer) don't make another one like it. And I'm
trading her my Compaq Contura 420C (after I put Win3.1 and Word 6 on
it) for it. Why do I get the feeling I'm making a huge mistake?
From what I remember, the tablet PC had a 486 CPU, 8MB RAM and a 7" or
so touch-sensitive screen you had to touch with a stylus. Oh, and it
ran Pen Windows. And it was black. And IIRC it had a pull-out keyboard.
BTW, anyone got a tablet based PC they feel like parting with? I'd
love to get one simply to recapture some of the childhood I lost when
my Mum chose the laptop over the tablet PC.
Later.
--
Phil.
philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com <mailto:philpem@dsl.pipex.com>
http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/
4:50 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Philip Pemberton wrote:
BTW, anyone got a tablet based PC they feel like
parting with? I'd love
to get one simply to recapture some of the childhood I lost when my Mum
chose the laptop over the tablet PC.
Does that qualify as parental abuse? Maybe you can report your mother to
the social service authorities to have her locked away as revenge ;)
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
6:20 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
Sellam Ismail wrote:
Does that qualify as parental abuse? Maybe you can
report your
mother to the social service authorities to have her locked away as
revenge ;)
Nah... Not my style. I've probably had more fun with the Samsung
laptop.
Shame the b*dy hard drive is a stupid Samsung proprietary design - ?800 for
a 700MB drive - I think not. I've just had to bodge in a Sonnenschein 3V6
Inorganic Lithium battery in place of the duff Tadiran CMOS battery. Lots of
fun - two layers of Sellotape, a bit of solder and a burned finger later and
I still don't know if it works.
As for my Compaq Contura, I had to pull most of the casing to bits just to
get to the battery holder...
Later.
--
Phil.
philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com
http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/
4:44 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Bob Shannon wrote:
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.
Why not just label the virtual PCMCIA card (the "book" icon) with the slot
number?
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
5:21 a.m.
New subject: Penpoint! was Re: 10 years
NEC asked this sort of question, but apparently at some lower level, the
OS did not know
which slot held which bit of media. There was some level of software, I
think called a MIL that
performed hardware abstraction for the higher-level OS. Its possible
that the MIL had no way
to communicate this info up to the OS level, and any fix would make
large changes to the way
the OS talked to the MIL layer. It was pretty late in the Go game for
that sort of change.
NEC's reaction to this was to abruptly 'kill' the whole program, but I
suspect that this had a lot
to do with 'saving face' over the battery cell issues that also plauged
the project.
So perhaps this all didn't kill Go as a company, it sure left a bad
taste in NEC's mouth where
non-Microsoft operating systems were concerned. I know that people
within NEC had big
plans for non-windows portables back then. It took a very long time
before NEC's portable
products group was comfortable working on anything less than a
conventional clamshell Windows
box. Even the Windows CE based MobilePro program was kept at arms
distance until it began to
sell fairly well. But even then, it was not treated as a main-stream
product line.
Sellam Ismail wrote:
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Bob Shannon wrote:
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.
Why not just label the virtual PCMCIA card (the "book" icon) with the slot
number?
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
4 Oct
4 Oct
4:48 p.m.
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Patrick Rigney wrote:
Yes, it still works. It's basically complete in the original box. I can
try to take a picture at some point, but I'm sure you can dig something up
on the web.
So were you around to observe all the Microsoft trickery and shenanigans
that led to them basically stealing PenPoint from under your noses?
Jerry Kaplan's book _Startup_ was a great read. But from what I heard,
the VCs basically considered Jerry a boob after the whole Go fiasco.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
I have one ;)
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
6 Oct
6 Oct
4:37 p.m.
So were you around to observe all the Microsoft
trickery and shenanigans
that led to them basically stealing PenPoint from under your noses?
Sellam, I never saw it that way. Microsoft has yet to produce anything
nearly as revolutionary as PenPoint. If they had the keys, they didn't use
them. Actually, Apple's Newton seemed to get more benefit from the demise
of Go than Microsoft... a lot of the really top-notch handwriting people
ended up going to work on the Newton.
Speaking of which... somebody must have a Newton??? And if it's you,
Sellam, then you need to give it up... both an Eo 440 and a Newton... that's
a lot of karma! :-)
Jerry Kaplan's book _Startup_ was a great read.
But from what I heard,
the VCs basically considered Jerry a boob after the whole Go fiasco.
Jerry founded Onsale, and was pretty much on the cutting edge of web-based
auctioning. I think he's probably done well enough that he doesn't need to
worry about what VCs think, which is a healthy thing for an entrepreneur.
IMHO, the success of your business is directly related to how _you_ feel
about it--the vision you build and the tenacity with which you stick by it
to make it a reality--not how a VC feels about it. Jerry always seemed to
stay true to his vision, and people were excited to work with him. That's
not the mark of a boob in my book.
Patrick
5:22 p.m.
On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Patrick Rigney wrote:
Speaking of which... somebody must have a Newton???
And if it's you,
Sellam, then you need to give it up... both an Eo 440 and a Newton... that's
a lot of karma! :-)
Newtons are relatively easy to find (certainly easier than an EO 440).
Yes, I also have a Newton. But it was very hard earned karma, so please
cut me some slack :)
Jerry founded Onsale, and was pretty much on the
cutting edge of web-based
auctioning. I think he's probably done well enough that he doesn't need to
worry about what VCs think, which is a healthy thing for an entrepreneur.
IMHO, the success of your business is directly related to how _you_ feel
about it--the vision you build and the tenacity with which you stick by it
to make it a reality--not how a VC feels about it. Jerry always seemed to
stay true to his vision, and people were excited to work with him. That's
not the mark of a boob in my book.
Me either, I was just reporting what I heard from an "insider".
It was a very good story at any rate.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
7 Oct
7 Oct
4:45 a.m.
New subject: Newton Karma (was RE: 10 years)
--- Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com> wrote:
On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Patrick Rigney wrote:
I don't have a Newton myself, but my girlfriend does. She got it
years before meeting me. She doesn't believe her when I tell her
the kind of "geek points" she earned. Between that and her teaching
herself to build web pages with a text editor (again, before she met
me), I think I'm pretty lucky. In return, I helped her move from
office work to a geek job. Now she's an operator for a data center
with NT, UNIX and 36-bit machines!
See how much karma a Newton conveys!
-ethan
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More
http://faith.yahoo.com
Speaking of which... somebody must have a
Newton??? And if it's you,
Sellam, then you need to give it up... both an Eo 440 and a Newton...
that's a lot of karma! :-)
Newtons are relatively easy to find (certainly easier than an EO 440).
Yes, I also have a Newton. But it was very hard earned karma, so please
cut me some slack :)
12:58 p.m.
Patrick Rigney wrote:
Speaking of which... somebody must have a Newton???
Yes, I have one: a MessagePad model H1000. I also have an
Amstrad PenPad PDA 600, an HP OmniGo, a Philips Nino and
a Microwriter AgendA.
Ooops, the Newton's only nine years old; I claim "cool factor"!
--
John Honniball
coredump(a)gifford.co.uk
5:18 p.m.
New subject: 10 years - Old Newtons
I have several older models the 100, 110, 120, 130, and eMate 300. They are
all really cool.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Honniball" <coredump(a)gifford.co.uk>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: 10 years
Patrick Rigney wrote:
Speaking of which... somebody must have a
Newton???
Yes, I have one: a MessagePad model H1000. I also have an
Amstrad PenPad PDA 600, an HP OmniGo, a Philips Nino and
a Microwriter AgendA.
Ooops, the Newton's only nine years old; I claim "cool factor"!
--
John Honniball
coredump(a)gifford.co.uk
8 Oct
8 Oct
4:17 p.m.
New subject: 10 years - Old Newtons
That eMate 300. Is that the laptop-formfactor (sort of) green machine
with no moving parts? Those things rocked.
Peace... Sridhar
On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Keys wrote:
I have several older models the 100, 110, 120, 130,
and eMate 300. They are
all really cool.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Honniball" <coredump(a)gifford.co.uk>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: 10 years
Patrick Rigney wrote:
Speaking of which... somebody must have a
Newton???
Yes, I have one: a MessagePad model H1000. I also have an
Amstrad PenPad PDA 600, an HP OmniGo, a Philips Nino and
a Microwriter AgendA.
Ooops, the Newton's only nine years old; I claim "cool factor"!
--
John Honniball
coredump(a)gifford.co.uk
4:20 p.m.
New subject: 10 years - Old Newtons
That eMate 300. Is that the laptop-formfactor (sort
of) green machine
with no moving parts? Those things rocked.
They sure did. Mine has a cracked LCD. :-(
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- Since we're all here, we must not be all there. -- Bob "Mountain" Beck
-----
4:32 p.m.
New subject: 10 years - Old Newtons
Has anyone else seen the pink and purple models? They were done up for a
special show.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cameron Kaiser" <spectre(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2002 8:30 PM
Subject: Re: 10 years - Old Newtons
http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
That eMate
300. Is that the laptop-formfactor (sort of) green machine
with no moving parts? Those things rocked.
They sure did. Mine has a cracked LCD. :-(
--
----------------------------- personal page: Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University *
ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- Since we're all here, we must not be all there.
-- Bob "Mountain"
Beck -----
4:30 p.m.
New subject: 10 years - Old Newtons
Yes it is.
----- Original Message -----
From: <vance(a)neurotica.com>
To: "Keys" <jrkeys(a)concentric.net>
Cc: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2002 5:12 PM
Subject: Re: 10 years - Old Newtons
That eMate 300. Is that the laptop-formfactor (sort of) green machine
with no moving parts? Those things rocked.
Peace... Sridhar
On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Keys wrote:
> I have several older models the 100, 110, 120, 130, and eMate 300. They
are
all really
cool.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Honniball" <coredump(a)gifford.co.uk>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: 10 years
Patrick Rigney wrote:
Speaking of which... somebody must have a
Newton???
Yes, I have one: a MessagePad model H1000. I also have an
Amstrad PenPad PDA 600, an HP OmniGo, a Philips Nino and
a Microwriter AgendA.
Ooops, the Newton's only nine years old; I claim "cool factor"!
--
John Honniball
coredump(a)gifford.co.uk
7953
days inactive
7958
days old
39 comments
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