AT&T Co’s AT&T Microelectronics unit duly announced its alliance with Go Corp on the PenPoint operating system late Monday, and also the formation of a new Personal Communications Systems company dedicated to developing semiconductor products, development tools and software based on the forthcoming Hobbit RISC microprocessor. Hobbit, as had been assumed but was never before confirmed, used the AT&T Bell Laboratories CRISP C-Language Rational Instruction Set Processor architecture: this was the AT&T contender in the RISC-for-Unix workstations stakes until the late Vittorio Cassoni persuaded the AT&T top brass to reject in in favour of the Sparc and pushed the company into its explosive and unstable relationship with Sun Microsystems Inc, which detonated the Unix Wars and led to the formation of the Open Software Foundation – yet never brought AT&T anything more than marginal benefit. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the Personal Communication Systems unit is headed by senior director Ahmed Nawaz. Nawaz is responsible for product planning, design and development, applications engineering, software vendor support and product marketing. The unit will also have operations in Japan, Europe and AT&T Microelectronics’ big base in Allentown, Pennsylvania. AT&T sees the pen-driven handheld computing devices being used primarily for communications. The agreement with Foster City, California-based Go Corp involves collaboration on development of products the two hope will be the foundation for an open system for the emerging Personal Communicators.
Optimise PenPoint
The two have been working together to optimise the PenPoint mobile operating system for small, communications-oriented devices to use the Hobbit RISC, and intend to work closely with hardware vendors, applications developers and other communications companies to establish the portable open system hardware and software environment. AT&T conceives Personal Communicators as being truly portable, offering comprehensive communications capability, and integrating speech – telephony presumably, data, handwriting recognition, facsimile, electronic mail, still images and, in the future, full-motion video. To this end, the Hobbit is optimised for low-power operation to extend battery life, and the parts are designed to work efficiently with signal processors and other technologies needed for communications-oriented devices. The Hobbit line will be formally introduced later this year. PenPoint is designed to support mobile communicating devices, having an integrated networking architecture to support intermittent connections via wired or wireless links, supporting multiple concurrent communications links, with facilities to store and forward messages, files and information when connections are established or re-established. Go has agreed to enhance PenPoint for Personal Communicators by adding an integrated messaging framework, which will enable all existing and future PenPoint applications to use the new features without modification. The operating system is object-oriented and modular so that it can be configured for use in devices at a variety of price points, memory configurations and sizes. AT&T is close behind Apple Computer Inc, still threatening to be the first serious player in the market with its forthcoming Newton personal digital assistant, which uses the Advanced RISC Machines Ltd ARM RISC, and IBM Corp is also backing PenPoint against the rival PenWindows from Microsoft Corp. PenPoint already runs on Intel Corp’s iAPX-86 architecture, and appropriate ultra low power 80386-derived microprocessors are now in development at Intel in partnership with VLSI Technology Inc.
