In the early 1980s, Sklarew discovered that Nadeau had been working on a prototype for an electronic book reader in his home and expressed interest in developing the concept further into a commercial product.

The two developed a system for digitizing handwriting for the IBM PC programmed in GW-BASIC, eventually delivering a prototype to venture capitalists.

[3]: 21  Development stalled for a year and a half until the duo met Arthur Rodbell, who had experience in raising seed capital and marketing for various companies.

Originally devised as a single-piece device, the final Write-Top was ultimately built out of two pieces, the system unit and the pen-enabled display; however, the two can be latched together to approximate a self-contained tablet.

[5] The Write-Top runs the Intel 8088–compatible NEC V20 microprocessor, clocked at 7.16 MHz, and contains 640 KB of static RAM, upgradable to 2 MB with an optional, proprietary SRAM card.

[8] The software reserves a number of specialized symbols representing commands such as deletion of the word at the position of the text cursor and copying and pasting.

[12] Following FCC Class B approval in late June 1988, the Linus Write-Top was released to the public in July 1988, supported by a value-added reseller network of 25 retailers.

In a post-mortem interview with USA Today, Sklarew said that "We were a little too early with not enough staying power", with the majority of the company's time spent educating corporate buyers on the pen computing paradigm.