A Brief History of the Tablet PC
The story of the Tablet PC starts way back in 1888 when a U.S. patent was granted to Elisha Gray for his electrical stylus device that captured handwriting and continued its development from 1888 to the 1960s. In the 1980s, the tablet technology was offered to PC users as an alternative to the mouse, and in 1989, Wang Laboratories introduced a program called Freestyle. Freestyle was a predecessor to today’s Tablet PC and ran in MS-DOS. It captured a screen shot and let users input audio and handwritten annotations. IBM introduced the first Tablet PC with the IBM ThinkPad 750P and 360P.
What is a Tablet PC?
A Tablet PC is a vertical or slate shaped personal computer with a touch screen. They use handwriting recognition to support the capturing of ink-based notes as image files and transfer them into notepad documents. While, for all intents and purposes, a Tablet PC does not have a keyboard, all Tablet PCs support keyboards and some even come with rotating/removable keyboards. Tablet PCs run on Windows operating systems.
Is There a Difference between a Tablet PC and Pen Computing?
All Tablet PCs are pen computers, but not all pen computers are Tablet PCs. A Tablet PC refers directly to the Microsoft brand Tablet PC, yet the term “tablet” has been popularized to signify any tablet-style personal computer. Pen computers are made by a number of manufacturers, including Dell, Sony, Fujutsu, and Gateway.
Who Uses Tablet PCs?
From business professionals to academics, Tablet PCs are a great choice for anyone who uses a laptop computer for annotations. The popularity of Tablet PCs for the medical and judicial field has been featured on shows like CBS’s CSI: New York and the NBC hit ER.
Tablet PC users enjoy the freedom of computing anywhere and anytime. Frequent airplane and subway riders don’t have to sacrifice the use of a full PC and can enjoy the liberty of multi-tasking during their commute without being dragged mono-positioning on a full keyboard.