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the touch screen computer was invented in 2009 at the APPLE store. the creator is unknown

The touch-screen was invented by Silicon Graphics and Sun in the late 1980s to early 1990s to replace the absolute position mouse-pad (Sun) and absolute position touch-pad (SGI).

It became obvious that if you already had a touch sensitive or position sensitive interface device which directly correlated to an absolute position on a screen, that the next logical move was to integrate that device with the screen so that one would touch the screen at the spot to which it correlated.

Among the issues that had to be overcome was that the physical size of a CRT screen was fixed but the projected size of the image on that screen would vary due to electric current fluctuations, etc and had to be calibrated at first use and sometimes after long intervals due to changes over time of power on the grid.

Another issue was that first generation absolute position mouse-pad/touch-pad designs had an opaque surface used for detecting the absolute position of the mouse/finger/stylus. The new technology had to have a detection system that would not interfere with the viewing of the screen.

Early solutions included a screen with four receivers at each corner which triangulated the position of a stylus. Other designs included a special stylus that connected to the video card. It would know exactly when any particular signal was being sent to the screen and would use a light sensor at the tip of the stylus to detect CRT output. By correlating the two, the system could calculate exactly where on the screen the stylus was placed. (Compare Nintendo's Duck Hunt).

The advantage of this method was that there was no need to calibrate for different screen sizes. The disadvantage was that it could not detect a touch and required a separate button-press to indicate a touch.

Other solutions included a transparent film connected to sensors around the edge which measured the stress applied to the film along the edge to detect where (and how hard) the screen was being touched.

One "universal" solution was a multi-axis motion/weight sensitive support device on which a monitor could be placed. Once synchronised, any touch on any part of the screen could be calculated via the motion of the screen detected by the support device. It's accuracy diminished with increased weight but was useful for monitors up to seventeen inches.

Eventually, capacitive and resistive sensors were being manufactures that were transparent. these could be placed directly on an LCD screen. With LCD screens, there was no need to calibrate the monitor as the pixel positions were fixed on the screen.

These devices, mainly used on Silicon Graphics imaging workstations and CADD/CAM workstations, started coming into use on personal computing devices with the popularity of the graphical user interface (GUI) desktop of Windows, OS/2, Apple, X-Windows, WAVE, GEM, and others.

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14y ago

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