The history of computing is very much the history of professionals trying to make the technical useable. A computer, after all, is basically a gigantic number-cruncher that does lots of math faster than your brain ever will. For such a thing to be marketable, computer designers have to put a kind of mask over the inner workings, an interface. We’re all familiar with the desktop metaphor, but for years designers have been trying to make computers even simpler. More like a scratch pad. Or notebook. More like a tablet, if you will. The iPad is only the latest machine in a long line of computers that designers have sought to be less like a number cruncher, and more like a friendly pad of paper.
1888: The Telautograph
Morse code is hard. All of those dots and dashes and the unfriendly user interface. Back in 1888 Elisha Gray must have said to himself “How can I take this current technology and make it more like writing a letter at my desk?” To deal with this, he invented the telautograph, a machine that would allow him to sit at his desk and write like he always did, except that his scribblings would be transmitted over the wires and reproduced at a receiving station, where another, similarly rigged pen would draw them out.
Gray took technical language and turned it into conventional technology, which is the essence of what a tablet PC does. Instead of navigating command lines, the average user organizes their computer like they would a desk. The tablet PC seeks to take this simplification even further, allowing one to use a computer as if it were a book or notepad, sometimes with a stylus. All of the gears and particulars of technology are hidden away, and using a computer is as easy as picking up a pen.
1968: The Dynabook
Computer scientist Alan Kaye is famous for saying “the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” and in 1968 he actually did that. Sort of. Kaye made plans for a computer that he thought would be used primarily in education and would be “a personal computer for children of all ages.”
Kaye’s design led directly to the Xerox Alto in 1973. The Alto was considered something of a “prototype Dynabook,” and even though Kaye’s original design has been a long time coming, the Alto itself was immensely influential, using the desktop-metaphor interface that we’ve all come to know and love.
Kaye, by the way, did not let go of his dream of using small computers as educational devices. While he still thinks that the Dynabook hasn’t been completely invented yet, he’s actively involved in One Laptop Per Child, which brings inexpensive computers to disadvantaged children throughout the world.
1989: The GRiDPad
The first commercially available tablet PC was a black and green eighties affair made by the Tandy Corporation (remember them?). The GRiDPad ran MS DOS and weighed just under five pounds, which was a big deal in the late eighties. There was no keyboard- the whole thing was controlled with a stylus. That’s right- it ran MS DOS with a stylus. Hey, it was the first one.
1989: The Apple Newton
1989 was a big year for people who wanted to poke computers with stylus’. The Newton was Apple’s first attempt at making a tablet PC, but plans were scaled back and it became a PDA instead. (Remember PDAs?) Apple had high hopes for the plucky little device, but the touted handwriting recognition software never really caught on and was notoriously error-ridden. The Newton sold too well to be written off as a failed system, but it didn’t meet Apple’s Olympian expectations of putting a stylus into everyone’s hand, either. The system ceased production in 1998, and is now known as something of a grandfather to the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
1991: PenPoint OS
Apparently a whole generation of programmers were possessed by the ghost of Elisha Gray, because a lot of people really, really wanted to get away from the keyboard. The people at the GO Corporation were so seized by the idea that writing was better than typing, that an entire operating system was constructed in an attempt to drive the QWERTY into obsolescence. The OS was primarily made for IBM’s ThinkPad, but ran on a handful of other systems as well. Microsoft followed suit later that year, and released Windows for Pen Computing in response. A legal dispute followed, with the GO Corporation alleging that Microsoft had infringed on their patent.
2001: Bill Gates gets excited about the tablet PC
After ten years of poking small green screens with plastic sticks, Bill Gates got up on stage at Comdex and unveiled a new prototype of a tablet PC. Gates declared the new type of computer to be the wave of the future, and then proceeded to prod it with a stylus in exactly the same way one would poke a Newton.
2001-2009: Bill Gates is disappointed by the tablet PC
Companies such as HP and Asus continued to design and release tablet PCs, but none of them threaten to change computing as we know it. Gate’s predictions in 2001 begin to look stale, and very few people bother to replace their laptops or netbooks with tablets. The smartphone market, though, remains steady. Speaking of which…
2007: The iPhone
The iPhone broke through the clouds and changed everything. It occurred to several people that Apple’s superphone was basically a tiny computer. A tiny computer that you carry around with you, and is convenient to use, and doesn’t have a keyboard. Thanks to technology developed by Fingerworks, the iPhone didn’t bother with a stylus, jettisoning one of the signature pieces of hardware of tablet PCs. It was a rousing success, and in 2010, Apple has released an even larger one.
We’re all a little closer to Alan Kaye’s Dynabook, and somewhere Elisha Gray’s ghost is probably smiling.
