The era
1987–2007
PBCA/ABOUT
A reunion hall for the people who built pen computing.
The Pen-Based Computing Alumni is the community side of the Pen-Based Computing History Museum — a place for the engineers, designers, founders, product managers, and writers of the stylus era to find one another again.
The museum keeps the record of what was built. This is where the people who built it gather, compare notes, and put the story on the record in their own words.
Membership is by invitation, open for anyone to read.
Why
we are here.
The premise
You were part of something that quietly shaped everything that came after.
Pen computing arrived before the hardware could fully carry it, but its ideas — gesture input, pocketable devices, lightweight tablets, handwriting recognition, the stylus itself — became the ground on which nearly every modern mobile device stands. The people who did that work are still reachable, and most of them have never been in the same room since.
The intent
Bring those people back together and get it on the record.
This is a by-invitation community for the alumni of the pen-computing era: a place to reconnect with old colleagues, settle the historical record, and — together — write down the story before it is lost. Membership is deliberately narrow — it is for the people documented in the Pen-Based Computing History Museum — but the story they tell is open for the world to read.
Who
belongs here.
01
You were in the room
To be included here, you had to be involved with the organizations documented in the Pen-Based Computing History Museum — the companies, publications, and projects that defined the stylus era. This is an alumni community in the literal sense.
02
You already have a profile
Everyone here has a profile in the museum. Your alumni account links straight to the museum’s record of who you are and what you worked on, so the community is built on the same primary-source history the museum maintains.
The
oral history.
We are creating the definitive oral history of the stylus computing era.
From GO and Momenta through Newton, General Magic, EO, Palm, and Windows for Pen Computing, the period from 1987 to 2007 was defined and consequential. The artifacts survive in the museum; the decisions, the successes, the near-misses, and the reasons behind them live only in the memories of the people who made them.
Together, the alumni here are assembling that account — recollection by recollection, correction by correction — into the definitive first-hand history of the era, told by the people who lived it.
Reconnect
& remember.
Above all, this is an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and share memories — to find the engineer you sat next to, the founder who hired you, the writer who covered your launch, or the competitor across town you only ever met at a trade show. Member profiles, forums, and groups make it easy to find each other again and trade the stories that never made it into a press release.