This is the first part in a series on the history pen and touch driven mobile computing. We begin with a look at some pioneering ideas that fueled later actual devices.
1966 – Star Trek
Star Trek introduced a world with gleaming ships, primary-colored uniforms and not a scrap of paper in sight. What Captain Kirk had instead was the PADD, a Personal Access Display Device for the 23rd century.
PADDs were remarkably close to the modern pad concept: a flat computer screen embedded in a frame the size of a clipboard. As the show was made in the 1960’s, they were also equipped with blinkenlights and an enormous angular stylus.
In later incarnations of the series, the PADD grew thinner and lost the stylus. While the Original Series never showed an actual user interface for the PADD, series from The Next Generation on used LCARS, a fictional OS. In the real world, the look of LCARS was designed by Michael Okuda.
1968 – 2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke’s written version of 2001 featured the Newspad, a flatscreen news viewing device the size of a sheet of paper. A user could view a summary of headlines or zoom into a story by punching in its code – presumably by some kind of a keypad.
Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort.
In Clarke’s future, the word “newspaper” remained even though the concept of delivering news on paper had become outmoded. It appears he was off by a decade or so.
The movie version showed the Newspads being used as flat screen portable televisions. The first attempts to create an actual flat TV were not made until the 1970’s.
1972 – Dynabook
In the late 1960’s, researcher Alan Kay dreamed of a personal computer he named the Dynabook. He detailed his ideas in the 1972 paper called A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages, which was published while he worked at Xerox Parc.
The Dynabook was to be portable and flat, with a screen fit for interactive graphics or electronic books. While the illustrations of the paper show a physical keypad, Kay also hypothesized that touchscreen keys were a viable option.
Kay intended the Dynabook as an educational environment where users would write their own programs. This theory of learning was very influential on the much later OLPC project.
Coming in part 2: Early pen and touch interfaces