Byte magazine awarded PenPoint best Operating System in the 1992 Byte Awards. PenPoint won in the Standards and Operating Systems category in
PC Magazine's 1991 Technical Excellence awards. The PenPoint operating system had novel early implementations of several computing advances, including: • a large set of
gestures such as circle to edit, X to delete, and caret to insert • using the same gestures at all levels of the operating system and applications • press and hold for moving any selection, which showed the selection as a floating icon to
drag and drop into a destination • a rich notebook user
interface metaphor: Documents existed as pages in a notebook with tabs (this was not new in PenPoint, but PenPoint was the first to make it a primary OS interface; Microsoft later did it in
Windows for Pen Computing) • a document architecture where each document was a directory nested in another document's directory (in some sense, this was an extension of the document architecture on
Multics) • dynamic toolkit layout: this allowed applications to rescale for landscape and portrait orientation • a system-wide pluggable
address book In April 2008, as part of a larger federal court case, the gesture features of the Windows/Tablet PC operating system and hardware were found to infringe on a patent by
GO Corp. concerning user interfaces for the PenPoint OS. ==Third-party applications==