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Why Did Touch Take 4 Decades to Catch On?

Posted by timothy on from the perhaps-no-one-knew-of-the-happy-ending dept.

theodp writes "You probably saw media coverage of Bill Gates showing off touch-screen technology to his CEO play group last week. With the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch, touch (and multi-touch) technology — which folks like Ray Ozzie enjoyed as undergrads way back in the early '70s — has finally gone mainstream. The only question is: Why did it take four decades for its overnight success? Some suggest the expiration of significant patents filed during '70s and '80s may have had something to do with it — anything else?"

2 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Clumsy... by shmlco · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A finger is a rather clumsy interface device compared to the pinpoint precision offered by a mouse. And when the OS and all of the software on that platform is designed for a keyboard and a mouse, then change becomes hard.

    Read Apple's user interface guidelines for developing applications and web applications for the iPhone. Touch screen interfaces truly require (to overuse the phrase once again) a new interface paradigm.

    Multitouch trackpads, on the other hand, simply overlay gestures on top of existing mechanisms. A two-finger tap is a "right click". A two-finger scrolling gesture translates easily into "scroll wheel" input. All events which existing systems and software understand.

    A "pinch", however, is a new type of input that has no translation. As such, software has to be reprogramed to understand that type of event, and then perform the appropriate behavior.

    --
    Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
  2. Re:For the same reason as the Wiimote. by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It became popular and available when the time was right, nothing more.

    That's partly true.

    I have a Compaq Concerto, one of the first touch-screen notebooks. I bought mine in 1994, but they were available for a couple of years before that.

    The touch-sensing hardware is good enough, but the cpu (486/25) struggles under the load and the computer feels unresponsive.

    The big problem though is software. MS introduced Windows for Pen Computing for this computer, and it sucks badly. It was never really updated either. Unfortunately, that was also when the Windows monopoly started to bite, so there was no other player to pick up the touch computing slack, and the concept withered until now.

    I'd say the monopoly was the biggest problem.

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."