History
The first electronic handwriting tablet was the Telautograph, patented by Elisha Gray in 1888. Elisha Gray is best known as a contemporaneous inventor of the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell.
The first graphics tablet resembling contemporary tablets and used for handwriting recognition by a computer was the Stylator in 1957. Better known (and often mis-stated as the first digitizer tablet) is the RAND Tablet also known as the Grafacon (for Graphic Converter), introduced in 1964. The RAND Tablet employed a grid of wires under the surface of the pad that encoded horizontal and vertical coordinates in a small magnetic signal. The stylus would receive the magnetic signal, which could then be decoded back as coordinate information.
The acoustic tablet, or spark tablet, used a stylus that generated clicks with a spark plug. The clicks were then triangulated by a series of microphones to locate the pen in space. The system was fairly complex and expensive, and the sensors were susceptible to interference by external noise.
Digitizers were popularized in the mid 1970s and early 1980s by the commercial success of the ID (Intelligent Digitizer) and BitPad manufactured by the Summagraphics Corp. These digitizers were used as the input device for many high-end CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems as well as bundled with PC's and PC based CAD software like AutoCAD.
Summagraphics also made an OEM version of its BitPad which was sold by Apple Computer as the Apple Graphics Tablet accessory to their Apple II. These tablets used a magnetostriction technology which used wires made of a special alloy stretched over a solid substrate to accurately locate the tip of a stylus or the center of a digitizer cursor on the surface of the tablet. This technology also allowed Proximity or "Z" axis measurement.
The first home computer graphics tablet was the KoalaPad. Though originally designed for the Apple II, the Koala eventually broadened its applicability to practically all home computers with graphics support, examples of which include the TRS-80 Color Computer, Commodore 64, and Atari 8-bit family. Competing tablets were eventually produced; the tablets produced by Atari were generally considered to be of high quality.
In 1981, musician Todd Rundgren created the first color graphics tablet software for personal computers, which was licensed to Apple as the Utopia Graphics Tablet System.
In the 1980s, several vendors of graphics tablets began to include additional functions, such as handwriting recognition and on-tablet menus.
Read more about this topic: Graphics Tablet-screen Hybrid
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)