Comparison of the EO 440 Personal Communicator (1993) and the Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader (2009). Both have reflective displays (no backlight). The EO has a liquid crystal display, the Kindle an electrophoretic one.
Eo, Inc., 52 percent owned by AT&T, shut down operations on July 29, 1994, after failing to meet its revenue targets and to secure the funding to continue. It was reported that 10,000 of the computers had been sold.[3]
In 2012, PC Magazine called the AT&T EO 440, "the first true phablet".[4]
Product specifics
Two models, the Communicator 440 and 880, were produced and measure about the size of a small clipboard. Both are powered by the AT&T Hobbit chip, created by AT&T specifically for running code written in the C programming language. They feature I/O ports such as modem, parallel, serial, VGA out and SCSI. The devices come with a wirelesscellular networkmodem, a built-in microphone with speaker, and a free subscription to AT&T EasyLink Mail for both fax and e-mail messages.
The operating system, PenPoint OS, was created by GO Corporation. Widely praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the OS did not gain widespread use. The applications suite, Perspective, was licensed to EO by Pensoft.
The MessagePad was a series of personal digital assistant devices developed by Apple Computer for the Newton platform in 1993. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's MessagePad devices was undertaken in Japan by Sharp. The devices are based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting recognition software and were developed and marketed by Apple. The devices run Newton OS.
Fax, sometimes called telecopying or telefax, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material, normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device. The original document is scanned with a fax machine, which processes the contents as a single fixed graphic image, converting it into a bitmap, and then transmitting it through the telephone system in the form of audio-frequency tones. The receiving fax machine interprets the tones and reconstructs the image, printing a paper copy. Early systems used direct conversions of image darkness to audio tone in a continuous or analog manner. Since the 1980s, most machines transmit an audio-encoded digital representation of the page, using data compression to transmit areas that are all-white or all-black, more quickly.
The PenPoint OS was one of the earliest operating systems written specifically for graphical tablets and personal digital assistants. It was a product of GO Corporation. PenPoint OS ran on AT&T Corporation's EO Personal Communicator and a number of Intel x86 powered tablet PCs including IBM's ThinkPad 700T series, NCR's 3125, 3130 and some of GRiD Systems' pen-based portables. It was never widely adopted.
GO Corporation was a company founded in 1987 to create pen-based portable computers, and a pen-based operating system and software. It was a pioneer of pen-based computing and was one of the most well-funded start-up companies of its time.
The AT&T Hobbit is a microprocessor design developed by AT&T Corporation in the early 1990s. It was based on the company's CRISP design resembling the classic RISC pipeline, and which in turn grew out of the C Machine design by Bell Labs of the late 1980s. All were optimized for running code compiled from the C programming language. The design concentrates on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access, and procedure calls.
Delrina Corporation was a Canadian software company active from 1988 to 1995. The company was best known for WinFax, a software package which enabled computers equipped with fax modems to transmit copies of documents to standalone fax machines or other similarly equipped computers. It also sold PerForm and FormFlow, electronic form software. Delrina was acquired by the American software firm Symantec in 1995.
The Apple USB Modem is a combined 56 kbit/s data modem and 14.4 kbit/s fax external USB modem introduced by Apple Inc. after the internal 56k modem was dropped on the October 12, 2005 iMac G5 revision. While it looks similar, it should not be confused with Apple's optional USB Ethernet Adapter accessory, available for its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina range of laptops since 2008.
WinFax is a discontinued Microsoft Windows-based software product developed and published by Delrina designed to let computers equipped with fax-modems communicate directly to stand-alone fax machines, or other similarly equipped computers.
The IBM Simon Personal Communicator is a handheld, touchscreen PDA designed by International Business Machines (IBM), and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric. Although the term "smartphone" was not coined until 1995, because of Simon's features and capabilities, it has been retrospectively referred to as the first true smartphone.
A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers, have similar capabilities, but lack some input/output (I/O) abilities that others have. Modern tablets largely resemble modern smartphones, the only differences being that tablets are relatively larger than smartphones, with screens 7 inches (18 cm) or larger, measured diagonally, and may not support access to a cellular network. Unlike laptops, tablets usually run mobile operating systems, alongside smartphones.
Internet fax, e-fax, or online fax is the use of the internet and internet protocols to send a fax (facsimile), rather than using a standard telephone connection and a fax machine. A distinguishing feature of Internet fax, compared to other Internet communications such as email, is the ability to exchange fax messages with traditional telephone-based fax machines.
The term personal communicator has been used with several meanings. Around 1990 the next generation digital mobile phones were called digital personal communicators. Another definition, coined in 1991, is for a category of handheld devices that provide personal information manager functions and packet switched wireless data communications capabilities over wireless wide area networks such as cellular networks. These devices are now commonly referred to as smartphones.
The Tandy Memorex Video Information System (VIS) is an interactive, multimedia CD-ROM player produced by the Tandy Corporation starting in 1992. It is similar in function to the Philips CD-i and Commodore CDTV systems. The VIS systems were sold only at Radio Shack, under the Memorex brand, both of which Tandy owned at the time.
Pen computing refers to any computer user-interface using a pen or stylus and tablet, over input devices such as a keyboard or a mouse.
FutureWave Software, Inc. was a software development company based in San Diego, California. The company was co-founded by Charlie Jackson and Jonathan Gay on January 22, 1993. VP of Marketing was Linda Michelle Alsip, who also came from Silicon Beach Software, then Aldus Corporation.
Ciright Systems is an information technology services company based in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania United States. Its flagship product is a Platform As A Service (PaaS) based Interoperable Cloud Platform that provides office and business automation to small and medium-sized businesses. The Ciright Platform also provides immediate mobile extendability to an enterprise's legacy system.
The history of tablet computers and the associated special operating software is an example of pen computing technology, and thus the development of tablets has deep historical roots. The first patent for a system that recognized handwritten characters by analyzing the handwriting motion was granted in 1914. The first publicly demonstrated system using a tablet and handwriting recognition instead of a keyboard for working with a modern digital computer dates to 1956.
Digital Ocean, Inc., was founded in 1992 by Jeffery Alhom. Digital Ocean was a maker of wireless products from 1992 until it was disbanded in 1998.
Samuel Jerrold "Jerry" Kaplan is an American computer scientist, author, futurist, and entrepreneur. He is best known as a pioneer in the field of pen computing and tablet computers. He is the founder of numerous companies, including GO Corporation, whose technology was used to develop the first smartphone and tablet PC. Kaplan is the co-founder of OnSale, the first B2C online auction site launched in 1994, five months prior to eBay. He is a recipient of the 1998 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award and author of the best-selling book Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure. He has been featured in major news publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Red Herring, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Kaplan is also the author of the 2015 book Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Additional companies he has co-founded include artificial intelligence company Teknowledge, Inc. and social game website Winster.com. Kaplan was briefly a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
Celeste Suzanne Baranski is an American electronic engineer, entrepreneur, and executive who helped create several pioneering electronic devices including early versions of the tablet computer. Baranski, with her colleague Alain Rossmann, won the Discover Award from Discover Magazine in 1993.
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