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
- Hugh Le Caine demonstrating the prototype of the Touch Sensitive Organ
- 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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