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The iPad's Progenitor — 123 Years Ago
scurtis writes "All technology evolves from cruder predecessors, and tablets are no different. People have been playing with some of the technologies underlying tablet PCs for over a century: In July 1888, for example, inventor Elisha Gray received a US patent for an electrical stylus device that captured handwriting. According to his original application, this 'telautograph' leveraged telegraph technology to send a handwritten message between a sending and receiving station."
I smell a lawsuit. Moses had the first tablets, right? I'm sure he at least copyrighted the term "tablet". Pay up.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
What BS. An ancient handwriting recorder has as much to do with the iPad as does pencil and paper.
...in the mid-80's, we used a similar device to send weather observations from the air traffic control tower I worked at (FYV) to the flight service station across the field. It would literally duplicate every stroke you made on the other end. IIRC, we called it the "electrowriter."
A few years later, they replaced it with a rebadged TI-99A that was "state of the art" for the FAA (and probably cost them thousands of dollars) where we could magically type in our ATIS report, and have them appear at the other end on a little amber monitor with attached thermal printer. High times those were!
I mean, seriously, this is more like a FAX technology than a tablet PC if you ask me.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
the GRiDPad by GRiD Systems Corporation beats that, introduced in 1989. it ran MS-DOS.
Am I the only one annoyed that it's obvious from the summary that this device is nothing even remotely like an iPad? How is this even news?
The iPad doesn't do anything with handwriting.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I thought that the iPad's progenitor was the Etch A Sketch.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Heh. I had the opposite reaction: it's annoying when the modern ego gets so huge that big chunks of history have to be recast as before-their-time flops that all lead up to [our new product, the best thing ever, GO BUY IT].
Wasn't it the Incas and the Maya who never developed the wheel? It is not an obvious invention, especially as it is useless on its own - you need roads or rails to use it efficiently. "cavemen" didn't invent the wheel - the Stonehenge builders are believed to have used round stones or logs to move the large stones, and they had quite an advanced Bronze Age society. There is a case that the inventor of the actual wheel - with a hub and axle - (and there must actually have been a first one) should have partial credit for modern civilisation. But it was Roman roads that made the wheel so useful. Here in the UK, up until the advent of railways, once you were off what was mainly the Roman road network wheels were of limited use, and water was a far more effective means of transport. The "Great Trek" and the Westward invasion of the US was done at under 2mph.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."