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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

> We pioneered categories like the 2:1

This is completely meaningless to me, and I'm more clued up than most people on this stuff. Why does Microsoft continue to sell—by the looks of it—pretty decent hardware with terrible marketing copy?

> Since my two youngest daughters...

This paragraph is completely shoehorned in, and in a different voice (the rest of the article is "We"). It's so clunky it hurts. Come on Microsoft.

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i think it means "two in one" - i.e. its a laptop, and a tablet, in one. (i.e. its a laptop with a detachable keyboard).

Not sure they pioneered it - I had an ancient Android tablet where you could take the keyboard off (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_Pad_Transformer) that was released in 2011. Pretty sure that wasn't the first either - anyone know of any earlier ones?

HP had their TC1100 back in 2004, and I loved it. It was a tablet XP computer with a separable keyboard and pen, and while not iPad/Surface levels of smoothness it was still amazing at the time. It wasn't MS hardware, but XP went to pretty great lengths at the time to make pen input a thing, so I guess that can count as part of their "pioneering" legacy.

Interestingly, here's a piece comparing the TC110 to the Surface Pro 3: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2363252/ten-years-after-hps-...

Probably the TabletPCs pioneered it. And those were Microsoft, circa 2000 / 2005

Well, the Compaq Concerto pioneered it in 1993. And Microsoft claims rightly to have been in the driver's seat with Windows for Pen [1] being one of the big features of the Compaq...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing

Hah I still have a Toshiba pen computing Windows machine somewhere from the early/mid-2000s.. They tried for a long time with those things..

I was keeping it to set up a kitchen computer.. I should just recycle it.

Yes, windows laptops supported tablet configurations back before 2007. Pens even.

Support is not equal to what Microsoft has accomplished with the Surface.

Yes, technology tends to progress and get better.. Apple didn't have anything on the market like this before 2007 at all either, but look where they are now.

Wrong decade. They had the eMate 300 back in 1997.

But Jobs wasn't interested in stylus-based laptops.

Kensington and Logitech (and others, I'm sure) had keyboard cases for the original iPad in 2010, although they communicated via bluetooth.

The key word you're missing here is pioneered. Nobody is claiming Microsoft invented the concept or was the first to release a product. It's that they were the first to have a commercially viable and sustainable product. I see Microsoft Surface tablets sold alongside iPads and Macs all the time. I don't see the Asus Eee Tablet.

It's just like Apple never invented the MP3 player but they sure as hell pioneered it.

> pioneer

Definition: One who ventures into unknown or unclaimed territory to settle.

Apple does not really fit the bill when it comes to MP3 players, but you could say they did when it came to the tablets since they pretty much created the category.

So, their claim to MP3 players is in the grand tradition of the American pioneer.

Apple never invented the tablet or the tablet category but again they absolutely pioneered it.

In fact it was apparently Microsoft that were the first:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053242/Steve-Jobs-i...

The company that created PenPoint OS was founded in the late 80's and shipped product in the early 90's. Their lead architect had previously worked at Xerox PARC on the Alto.

https://wikivisually.com/wiki/PenPoint_OS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmFUJ-pxG3E

Microsoft started down the path towards Surface by adding rudimentary pen support in Windows 3.1 as a response to what these guys were doing.

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