History
By 1982 Apollo desktop computers were equipped with a touchpad on the right side of the keyboard.
A touchpad was first developed for Psion's MC 200/400/600/WORD Series in 1989. Cirque introduced the first widely available touchpad, branded as GlidePoint, in 1994. The touchpads included in Apple Computers’ PowerBooks were based upon Cirque’s GlidePoint technology; another early adopter of the GlidePoint pointing device was Sharp. Later, Synaptics introduced their touchpad into the marketplace, branded the TouchPad. Epson was an early adopter of this product.
As touchpads began to be introduced in laptops in the late 1980s, there was often confusion as to what the product should be called. No consistent term was used, and references varied, such as: glidepoint, touch sensitive input device, touchpad, trackpad, and pointing device.
Users were often presented the option to purchase a pointer stick, touchpad, or trackball. Combinations of the devices were common, though touchpads and trackballs were rarely included together.
Read more about this topic: Touchpad
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)