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At 13th January of 1984, the KoalaPad Touch Tablet was released. The KoalaPad is a graphics tablet produced by U.S. company Koala Technologies for several early 8-bit home computers, including the Apple II family, TRS-80 Color Computer (TRS-80 Touch Pad), Atari 8-bit family, and Commodore 64, as well as for the IBM PC.
The touchscreen, a display that's sensitive to human touch or a stylus, has been around for nearly half a century. It's used on ATM machines, GPS systems, cash registers, medical monitors, game consoles, computers, phones and continues to appear in newer technologies. E.A. Johnson is believed to be the first to develop the touchscreen in 1965. But the tablet, which was patented in 1969, could only read one touch at a time, and it was used for air traffic control until about 1995.
Bent Stumpe and Frank Beck, two engineers at CERN, developed a transparent, capacitive touch screen in the early 1970s. This kind of screen relies on having an object pressing particularly hard against its surface, and will only react to certain objects like a stylus.
It was manufactured by CERN and utilized in 1973. Samuel G. Hurst founded the resistive touchscreen in the 1971. Hurst's sensor, called the "Elograph," was named after his company Elographics, but it was not mass-produced and sold until the early 1980s.
Unlike a capacitive screen, the resistive design is made of several layers, and responds to touch of a finger or stylus. The outer layer flexes under any touch, and is pushed back onto a layer behind it. This completes a circuit, telling the device which part of the screen is being pressed.
Multi-touch technology began in 1982, when the University of Toronto developed a tablet that could read multiple points of contact. Bell Labs developed a touchscreen that could change images with more than one hand in 1984. Around the same time, Myron Krueger developed an optical system that tracks hand movements. This was the beginning for the gestures we've adapted to so easily today.
The next time you use your shiny new Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CC 2017, think back to a time before time; a time before blends, morphs, heal brushes, and 10-megapixel images. A time like 1984, which, for computer graphics, was darker than the Dark Ages.
It was a time when you could buy an $90.00 KoalaPad Touch Tablet for your Atari 8-bit home computer. Touch technology and tablets in 1984 was quite too early for its commercial primetime but Koala Technologies made one for the Commodore, Apple and Atari machines. They even got the ‘Pad’ name and a Koala as a mascot without people chuckling.
Originally designed by Dr. David Thornburg as a low-cost computer drawing tool for schools, the KoalaPad consisted of a 4″x4″ drawing area and two buttons. The KoalaPad also came with KoalaPainter, a relatively basic drawing program that allowed budding artists to draw basic shapes, swap colors, and load and save their creations. It was no PhotoShop, but for the time, it was pretty awesome.
The KoalaPad could be operated with the pressure of a pen stylus, or a finger for less precise work. It included two buttons along the top for operating additional software features. The top-mounted buttons tended to be somewhat frustrating to use, as the user had to "reach around" the stylus to push the buttons in order to start or stop drawing. A similar tablet from Atari, the "Atari CX77 Touch Tablet", addressed this with a built-in button on the stylus, which some enterprising users adapted for use with their KoalaPad.
The pad shipped with a simple bitmap graphics editor called KoalaPainter (aka KoalaPaint or PC Design), developed for Koala by Audio Light, Inc. Although bundled with the pad, KoalaPainter could also be operated using an ordinary digital joystick.
One unique feature of the program, for its time, was that it held two pictures in the computer's memory, allowing the user to flip from one to the other, a function commonly used in order to study the differences between an original and modified picture, and to copy and paste between two different pictures.
Some third-party bitmap editors could also be used with the KoalaPad, such as Broderbund's Dazzle Draw for the Apple II. While inferior for modern technological standards, the KoalaPad Touch Tablet was an impressive piece of hardware and a well designed and brilliant idea at the time.
#KoalaPad #Vintage
#Gadgets #Retro #Technology
#Oldschool #80sTechnology
#Onthisday #Tablet #GraphicsTablet
#80sMemories #KoalaTechnologies
At 13th January of 1984, the KoalaPad Touch Tablet was released. The KoalaPad is a graphics tablet produced by U.S. company Koala Technologies for several early 8-bit home computers, including the Apple II family, TRS-80 Color Computer (TRS-80 Touch Pad), Atari 8-bit family, and Commodore 64, as well as for the IBM PC.
The touchscreen, a display that's sensitive to human touch or a stylus, has been around for nearly half a century. It's used on ATM machines, GPS systems, cash registers, medical monitors, game consoles, computers, phones and continues to appear in newer technologies. E.A. Johnson is believed to be the first to develop the touchscreen in 1965. But the tablet, which was patented in 1969, could only read one touch at a time, and it was used for air traffic control until about 1995.
Bent Stumpe and Frank Beck, two engineers at CERN, developed a transparent, capacitive touch screen in the early 1970s. This kind of screen relies on having an object pressing particularly hard against its surface, and will only react to certain objects like a stylus.
It was manufactured by CERN and utilized in 1973. Samuel G. Hurst founded the resistive touchscreen in the 1971. Hurst's sensor, called the "Elograph," was named after his company Elographics, but it was not mass-produced and sold until the early 1980s.
Unlike a capacitive screen, the resistive design is made of several layers, and responds to touch of a finger or stylus. The outer layer flexes under any touch, and is pushed back onto a layer behind it. This completes a circuit, telling the device which part of the screen is being pressed.
Multi-touch technology began in 1982, when the University of Toronto developed a tablet that could read multiple points of contact. Bell Labs developed a touchscreen that could change images with more than one hand in 1984. Around the same time, Myron Krueger developed an optical system that tracks hand movements. This was the beginning for the gestures we've adapted to so easily today.
The next time you use your shiny new Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CC 2017, think back to a time before time; a time before blends, morphs, heal brushes, and 10-megapixel images. A time like 1984, which, for computer graphics, was darker than the Dark Ages.
It was a time when you could buy an $90.00 KoalaPad Touch Tablet for your Atari 8-bit home computer. Touch technology and tablets in 1984 was quite too early for its commercial primetime but Koala Technologies made one for the Commodore, Apple and Atari machines. They even got the ‘Pad’ name and a Koala as a mascot without people chuckling.
Originally designed by Dr. David Thornburg as a low-cost computer drawing tool for schools, the KoalaPad consisted of a 4″x4″ drawing area and two buttons. The KoalaPad also came with KoalaPainter, a relatively basic drawing program that allowed budding artists to draw basic shapes, swap colors, and load and save their creations. It was no PhotoShop, but for the time, it was pretty awesome.
The KoalaPad could be operated with the pressure of a pen stylus, or a finger for less precise work. It included two buttons along the top for operating additional software features. The top-mounted buttons tended to be somewhat frustrating to use, as the user had to "reach around" the stylus to push the buttons in order to start or stop drawing. A similar tablet from Atari, the "Atari CX77 Touch Tablet", addressed this with a built-in button on the stylus, which some enterprising users adapted for use with their KoalaPad.
The pad shipped with a simple bitmap graphics editor called KoalaPainter (aka KoalaPaint or PC Design), developed for Koala by Audio Light, Inc. Although bundled with the pad, KoalaPainter could also be operated using an ordinary digital joystick.
One unique feature of the program, for its time, was that it held two pictures in the computer's memory, allowing the user to flip from one to the other, a function commonly used in order to study the differences between an original and modified picture, and to copy and paste between two different pictures.
Some third-party bitmap editors could also be used with the KoalaPad, such as Broderbund's Dazzle Draw for the Apple II. While inferior for modern technological standards, the KoalaPad Touch Tablet was an impressive piece of hardware and a well designed and brilliant idea at the time.
#KoalaPad #Vintage
#Gadgets #Retro #Technology
#Oldschool #80sTechnology
#Onthisday #Tablet #GraphicsTablet
#80sMemories #KoalaTechnologies
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