The first Apple Tablet, from 1979 (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The first Apple Tablet, from 1979 (2009)

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74 pointscoloneltcb19 comments

What throws me for a loop is that Todd Rundgren, known for his prolific career in music, was the developer of a companion program to this tablet (and more).

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/mar/18/onlinesup...

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/todd-rundgren-why-isn...

this is actually why I submitted it! (I put the Todd Rundgren fact in the headline but HN mods apparently thought that wasn't relevant). He's mentioned it briefly in a couple interviews (like that Guardian article you linked, and on a podcast with Bob Lefsetz), but I have yet to see an in-depth article about Todd's career/hobby as a software developer. I'd love to read an article only about that one day.

The first graphic tablet resembling contemporary tablets and used for handwriting recognition by a computer was the Stylator in 1957. Better known (and often misstated as the first digitizer tablet) is the RAND Tablet also known as the Grafacon

Digitizers were popularized in the mid-1970s and early 1980s by the commercial success of the ID (Intelligent Digitizer) and BitPad manufactured by the Summagraphics Corp. The Summagraphics digitizers were sold under the company's name but were also private labeled for HP, Tektronix, Apple, Evans and Sutherland and several other graphic system manufacturers

Note: This is an input device, akin to a mouse or a trackpad. It is not anything like an iPad or what you nowadays call a “tablet”. The surface you see is not a display screen. This kind of device is also sometimes also known as a digitizer board.

Or indeed graphics tablet, drawing tablet, or pen tablet. This usage of "tablet" predates the currently more popular one. Drawing tablets are commonly used by today’s digital artists too.

Yeah, from that same period I remember the lab where I worked had a giant drafting table-sized digitizer. It could be angled and it weighed a ton.

Those things died out, clearly a large format scanner is better.

How the hell did they start the company in 1976, released Apple II in 1977 and then released few more products in next two years including Apple Graphics Tablet? Were they working 24/7?

Hard- and software were way easier at the time. This device had 2 kilobytes of ROM (https://downloads.reactivemicro.com/Documentation/Manuals/Ap...)

It would surprise me if you could have a USB device properly identify itself in that amount of memory

Ah, I keep forgetting this. Today prototyping takes months as we cannot solder components in our offices because of the size of the ICs. I also read that they barely had any software for Apple II until VisiCalc debuted (a software not even written by Apple's engineers).

Not really true. Even hobbyists can happily solder today's tiny parts. Even BGAs. You can order chips overnight, and there are many adaptors to let you breadboard with them. Where signal quality concerns prevent breadboarding, someone in China will produce a one-off board for you the same day and mail it to you overnight. If you have more money, you can engage a contractor like Foxconn that have offices in the US. Send them revisions at 9AM, drive over to their office, have the new version to test that night. (You teach them how to manufacture your board in the US, and then they mass produce it in China.)

Nobody is having problems getting prototypes going quickly these days. We have much better debug and test tooling today. We have factories for prototype runs available literally overnight.

The reason no hardware hackers are making pen tablets today is because you can go on Amazon and have one delivered to you for $20, same day.

Today's big problem is supply chain issues for manufacturing in quantity. You'll spend 1000 hours of software engineering effort for a certain microcontroller, QA test it on your prototype board, and then find that the microcontroller family is no longer made (or has indefinite lead times). You then throw the software away and delay the project another year.

Not really true. At the time, there was lots of software for the Apple II. There was no spreadsheet software because VisiCalc was one of the first to be released. Most software was created by 3rd parties. “A software” didn’t need to be approved by a centralized store controlled by Apple.

This is precisely why things like Arduino took off.

That kind of graphics tablet was just an input device, typically used for digitizing drawings which had been either drawn by hand or generated by some kind of device without a computer interface.

It has nothing to do with tablets in the sense of small computers.

Its design was mostly a hardware design problem, somewhat more difficult than designing a mouse, because it had accuracy requirements, but not much more.

It's weird that you need to explain this to people who've never used a pen tablet without a screen. I mean, many of us have used wacom pads as standard input devices for decades. With a bit of hand-eye coordination, it's amazing what humans can do.

they didn't manufacture it, they simply labeled it as Apple.

Same as the Apple Cluster Controller used to interface Apple computers as dumb 3270 terminals to IBM mainframes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32293269

Apple ][ user from way back, I’d never seen this! I bought a Koala pad with my //e when it came out, but never became proficient with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad

I still have have a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a with a pantograph style digitizer called a “Super Sketch” that plugs into the cartridge port. It’s pretty rough. No disc drive so I can’t save.

http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/super_sketch.html

No longer have the Koala but I do still have a IIgs with most of the add-ons. 8MB RAM, 1gb compactflash HD, DVI video, quadraphonic sound, ethernet. Amazing how there is still active development on the platform.

This is quite innovative, at the time most 'digitisers' had a pantograph arm with a couple of potentiometers going into a A to D converter plugged into a parallel port. Such systems cost a fortune and suffered from analog noise problems.

The 'digitiser' survived for a while in things like GIS but what Apple was doing with their tablet won long term.

You had to be careful with the tablet and magnetic floppy disks. On powerup there was a big magnetic pulse that could easily damage a floppy, if it was sitting on the tablet. And usually, the tablet was the only open flat space on the table...

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