History
The first light pen was created around 1952 as part of the Whirlwind project at MIT.
During the 1960s light pens were common on graphics terminals such as the IBM 2250, and were also available for the IBM 3270 text-only terminal.
The light pen found use during the early 1980s. It was notable for its use in the Fairlight CMI, and the BBC Micro. IBM PC compatible CGA, HGC and some EGA graphics cards featured a connector for a light pen as well. Even some consumer products were given light pens, such as the Thomson MO5 computer family as well as the Atari 8-bit home computers.
Because the user was required to hold his arm in front of the screen for long periods of time or to use a desk that tilts the monitor, the light pen fell out of use as a general purpose input device.
Read more about this topic: Light Pen
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)