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Comment by AlisdairO | Hacker News Reader

You're bandying around the term 'multi-touch', and shooting down responses that don't reference multi-touch using a capacitive screen. Multi-touch is a technology-neutral term that simply means a system with the ability to respond to multiple touches at the same time, and the Surface clearly qualifies. MSR did a load of useful UI research on multi-touch devices, and deserve credit for that.

Apple released the first commercial device with a capacitive multi-touch screen (that I'm aware of), and it was absolutely a leap forward - the technology the surface used wasn't suitable for mobile devices. Apple deserve a lot credit for making an interesting, accurate, and responsive UI using new screen hardware (which, it should be pointed out, was not created by Apple). Surely this distinction isn't too hard to understand.

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The key problem here is that people are conflating technologies that work on a completely different principle and don't have the same capabilities with the iPhone touch technology, and saying that their existence proves that nothing was invented for the iPhone. However, this is obviously false, as the technologies work using different methods and have different capabilities.

Multi-touch is a trademarked term[1] Apple uses to describe its technology for resolving the amorphous blob a finger makes when in contact with a screen into a single pixel.

Notice that the surface doesn't do this. It just detects a finger, but it can also detect a stylus or anything else. Its accuracy is that of an object, maybe a finger, not a pixel somewhere under the finger that is much smaller than the finger.

I'm not discounting Microsoft's work, it its just not relevant to this discussion.

When doing the trademark search just now, I found that some one else used it to talk about a switch based technology, invented around 1990.[2]

Again, "touch screens" whereby finger pressure closes a circuit by bending one trace into another has been around since the 1970s. These are almost alway single touch, but even when they can detect two fingers, they are not solving the same problem Apple did.

Apple resolved a finger down to a pixel, these things just detect fingers. There's a huge difference.

Thus, people bringing up these other technologies that do not even do the same thing, as if they are "prior art" are being dishonest.

[1]Word Mark MULTI-TOUCH Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Handheld mobile digital electronic devices with electronic mail, digital data transmission, audio player, video player, handheld computer, personal digital assistant, electronic organizer, electronic notepad, telephone, computer gaming, and camera functions. FIRST USE: 20070109. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20070629 Standard Characters Claimed Mark Drawing Code (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK Serial Number 77219819 Filing Date June 30, 2007

[2]Word Mark MULTI-TOUCH Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: switches, switch panels, and communication circuits. FIRST USE: 19900202. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19900202 Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING Serial Number 74438236 Filing Date September 21, 1993

Apple's trademark application got denied because the term multi-touch is generic ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/66447722/Multi-Touch-Trademark )

Additionally, there's a load of research referencing the term 'multi-touch' a long time prior to the iPhone - a quick google scholar search, for example: http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=multi-touch&hl=en&...

Apple did not invent capacitive multi-touch capable screens, and they did not invent the common UI metaphors used in multi-touch screens. Apple's software did make for a very precise capacitive touch screens, but their improvements were incremental.

This is not to downplay their achievement in the iPhone - I think it was a marvellous device, and the first truly usable smartphone - I just don't think it's fair to ignore the contributions of those who came before, and the long history of research into multi-touch screens.

You shifted the goalposts. The trademark is listed on the USPTO.gov site, as being live and owned by Apple. They don't provide the ability to link to it directly, which is why I quoted it with enough info for you to do your own search.

I'm not ignoring the contributions that came before, I'm refuting the claim that Apple didn't invent it, specifically when people cite other methodologies.

Here are two papers which thoroughly describe capacitive multitouch interfaces years before Apple released products based on the technology:

A Multi-touch Three Dimensional Touch-Sensitive Tablet: http://www.billbuxton.com/leebuxtonsmith.pdf

Applying Electric Field Sensing to Human-Computer Interfaces: http://www.media.mit.edu/~jrs/jrs_EFS_HCI.pdf

If you go through the references you'll find dozens of other papers on the subject. Academics in the HCI field have been working toward this kind of technology since the late 70s.

Fingerworks/Apple did not invent the technology, can we put this to rest?

Neither of those papers describe capacitive multitouch interfaces, nor do they describe the technology Apple invented for multi-touch. The first describes a multi-point interface that does not do what Apple does, and the second doesn't even describe a touch interface at all.

This would be obvious if you'd taken a few minutes to read their abstracts, and were aware of the nature of Apple's multi-touch invention.

The issue has been laid to rest, but I can't stop you and others from continuing to link to increasingly irrelevant claims.

The real question, to my mind, is why are you so desperate to believe that Apple didn't invent anything, such that you'd disparage yourself by being as dishonest as you have been here?

The first paper describes a multitouch capacitive touch tablet in 1985. It is absolutely identical to the core technology of an iPad. Apple may have improved things but the core ideas are layed out right here two decades before the iPad.

> A prototype touch-sensitive tablet Is presented. The tablet's main innovation is that It Is capable of sensing mare than one point of contact at a time. In addition to being able to provide position coor- dinates, the tablet also gives a measure of degree of contact, independently for each point of contact. In order to enable mutU- touch sensing [...]

What's more the author of the paper, Bill Buxton, is widely cited in the literature as inventing the capactive multitouch display. Wayne Westerman, one of the cofounders of Fingerworks dissertation has dozens of references to his work. But even in his own words:

> What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."

It's all clear as day if you do your research, unless of course you're already made up your mind... then maybe it's not so clear.

Here's a link to the trademark claim in question: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=7...

Note the status:

> Current Status: An appeal of a final refusal to register the mark is pending before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. For further information, see TTABVUE on the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board web page.

Their trademark claim is basically dead in the water. Multi-touch is a generic term. I leave it to the other reply in this thread to deal with the debate about the novel work Apple/Fingerworks did.

edit: You probably owe other posters in this thread an apology for accusations of lying, based on your own misconception of what multi-touch actually means.

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