No Virginia, touch was NOT invented by Apple
How many times have you seen on the web a mention of the great invention of the touch interface that Apple gave us with the iPhone? I have seen it so many times that I almost ignore it now, and that’s not a good thing. Touch screen interfaces on devices have been around for a long, long time. Long before Apple’s iPhone. Admittedly Apple improved the technology quite a bit with gestures and other features but they did NOT invent touch on gadgets. Heck, Apple’s own Newton was produced years before the iPhone and it had touch. It wasn’t the first gadget with touch either as far as that goes. Devices were produced by Palm and others with touch interfaces long before the iPhone so let’s quit saying how Apple invented touch. Please. Even big publications who should know better make the Apple invention claim, like a recent item by Gearlog:
Touch was a revolutionaryconcept when it debuted with the iPhone, in part because it wasimplemented so well with gestures.
Not even close to being correct. Does anybody know what was the very first mobile gadget with a touch interface? If you do then chime in and let’s set the record straight.
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Here’s one claim.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bltouch.htm
Very interesting stuff Warner. Now, what was the first mobile gadget released commercially that had touch?
I’ll go with a product from HP. Am I getting warm?
Probably but I don’t know for sure. That’s why we need someone who knows to chime in. :)
Oh, in that case, let’s go with Wikipedia for starters and take it from there with proof of correctness or inaccuracy. ;)
“The HP-150 from 1983 was probably the world’s earliest commercial touchscreen computer. It actually does not have a touchscreen in the strict sense, but a 9″ Sony CRT surrounded by infrared transmitters and receivers which detect the position of any non-transparent object on the screen.” Sounds more like the first Surface computer now that I re-read it. :)
im tempted to say palm, but i suspect the newton was out before then.
not that any of those was touch in the way the iphone uses it, as they where stylus devices with resistive screens.
wikipedia puts the HP-150 as “probably the earliest commercial touchscreen computer”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_screen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-150
heh, to slow…
btw, there is a mobile phone around that uses a similar system to the HP-150.
dont recall its name at the moment tho :(
You are WAAAAAY missing the point. It’s an exciting Easter Egg hunt to figure who brought touch on board first, and totally irrelevant unless you’re only goal is to discredit an obviously ignorant and poorly researched claim that some guy posts on the Internet. If that’s you’re goal in life, then you are going to be BUSY.
The real item that people don’t ever cover, and it should be brought up in every conversation involving the iPhone and touch, is that the technology wasn’t developed by Apple. Apple purchased a company called FingerWorks to acquire their technology. It was a great company with great technology developed by some very smart academics. They killed that company and its products which was a loss for many loyal customers. This is the kind of corporate suffocation that Microsoft usually takes heat for. Do some research on FingerWorks and their touchsteam line. Think about Apple as a company. See if you can connect the dots. See if you can figure out that a multitouch trackpad wouldn’t drive sales of MacBooks because those consumers are feature-inelastic. See if you can figure out how to pay down those acquisition costs before introducing the the gesture technology into the trackpads.
You’d also be well-advised to hold your blog-mate accountable for the error. In med school, there was this mildly racist girl that would make you cringe when she opened her mouth. We never left one of her rants learning more about X people or why Y people drove better than Z people. We didn’t quckly run to the library to try to dispute her claims. We just left learning more about her as a racist. Similarly, perhaps the better response to the Gearlog piece is to come away realizing that they’re part of the Apple hype machine. Seems to be the most truth that can be squeezed out of that article.
Finally, if this is the kind of stuff that you do for a living then you’re welcome for the help. If you want to reciprocate then I’ll see you in surgery in one hour. I’ll flail about excitedly and you can help my hands make precision contact with the patient.
Apple didn’t invent the mp3 player either. Creative pioneered the mp3 player and invented the GUI, which Apple stole from them. Creative’s first player was out a year before the iPod came out. Apple’s iPod unfairly dominates the market and Creative doesn’t get any recognition. Creative’s ZEN player kills the iPod with it’s higher resolution screen, supports more windows audio & video formats and has better sound quality thanks to it’s X-Fi technology.