First Touch Screen Computer

As long ago as 1951 Isaac Asimov gave a character in his novel Foundation a small and portable computer that was operated by touching the screen. Naming it the Calculator Pad, he described how its “grey, glossy finish was slightly worn by use”. Similar devices appeared during the Sixties in the original series of Star Trek, as well as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the Seventies and Eighties, a succession of tech entrepreneurs and computer scientists tried to develop real versions of those contraptions. Sadly, the first tablet computers, as they were known, were too expensive, inefficient or unreliable to succeed (and sometimes all three). The first to make a commercial impact was introduced in 1989. It was the GridPad which
was developed by the Grid Systems Corporation, a dynamic Silicon Valley startup founded a decade before.

One of Grid’s brightest computer scientists, Jeff Hawkins, was given carte blanche to experiment with new ideas. The result was the GridPad, a touch-screen computer operated by a stylus. Weighing 2kg, it was 12 x 9 x 1.4in in size and priced at a whopping $3,000, the equivalent of $6,000 (£4,600) today. Nevertheless, the GridPad sold well, largely because Grid concentrated on marketing it to large organisations such as Chrysler and the US Army. In its best year, theGridPad’s sales reached $30 million, prompting a surge of investment in tablet design by other Silicon Valley companies. Most of their products flopped, including Atari’s Stylus and Apple’s Newton.

After trying – and failing – to persuade Grid to launch the Zoomer, a tablet he developed for consumer use, Hawkins quit to cofound Palm Computing, which introduced its first product, the PalmPilot, in 1996. Once ubiquitous, the PalmPilot is
now defunct, but Hawkins has seen his GridPad transform the global computer market. If you’re reading this on an Apple iPad, you are clutching its most successful child.