Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Touch Technology History

This is the selectively combined summary of articles about the history of touch technologies. I referred to a report from Morgan Stanley Research, Bill Buxton’s article about multitouch, and “Touchscreen technologies in phones” at Phone Arena.

 

  • 1954
  • 1972
    • Touch screen was used on PLATO by the University of Illinois
  • 1974
    • Dr. Hurst designed the first transparent touchscreen
  • 1977
    • Elographics invented and patented the 5-wire resistive technical method
  • 1979
    • 3M patented surface capacitive technology
  • 1981
  • 1982
    • Elo Touch Systems invented the resistive touch sensing technology
    • Flexible Machine Interface, the first multi touch input system, was published (Mehta, Nimish, A Flexible Machine Interface, M.A.Sc. Thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Toronto, 1982)
  • 1984
    • Bob Boie at Bell Labs invented the first multi touch screen
  • 1985
    • Zenith patented the Surface Acoustic Touch Panel System
    • Input Research Group at University of Toronto developed multi-touch tablet
  • 1987
    • Elo Touch Systems puchased SAW technology from Zenith
  • 1990
    • Nissha developed the FineTouch touch panel
  • 1993
    • Apple’s Original Newton Message Pad H1000 was introduced
  • 1995
    • MicroTouch launched the first projected capacitive touch sensor
  • 1996
    • Palm introduced Palm Pilot 1000, the first commercially successful PDA with the resistive touch screen
  • 2000
    • 3M acquired MicroTouch
  • 2001
    • Zytronic developed ZyTouch projected capacitive touch sensor and applied it to the first Tablet PC prototype
    • Microsoft demonstrated the first public prototype of Tablet PC
    • MERL developed Diamond Touch multitouch system using projected capacitive touch technology
  • 2002
    • Sony published a paper about SmartSkin multitouch system. SmartSkin adopted mutual capacitive sensing that is also used in iPhone.
  • 2003
    • NextWindow and Smart Technologies started producing optical touch panels
    • FingerWorks developed input peripherals based on the multi touch technology
  • 2004
    • Nintendo launched Nintendo DS, a handheld gaming device with dual screen and a touch display
  • 2005
    • TMD start mass production of touch-embedded TFT using optical sensors
    • Jeff Han demonstrated the first FTIR multi touch
  • 2007
    • Apple unveiled iPhone
    • AUO demonstrated in-cell touch panel technology at Yokohama FPD conference
    • Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Surface
  • 2008
    • HP released multi touch Tablet PCs
  • 2009
    • Dell launched a multi-touch all-in-one PCs
    • Touchco was founded
  • 2010
    • Apple released iPad
    • Amazon acquired Touchco

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