Own a cheap tablet PC and you will be the talk of the techno town today. You will be surprised to find and interested to know that the super successful tablet PCs of today have come a long way before they actually became this popular. As with many great ideas and inventions, years of experimenting, investments, brainstorming, adjustments and technological tweaks have led up to the tablet being the power tool that it is today. One of the major reasons that it took time for the tablets to establish themselves as viable is that in earlier years, there was simply not enough technological knowledge and insufficient tools to develop the genius idea.
The cheap tablet PC was initially envisioned in the early 1980′s to be based on handwriting recognition technology which was developed and introduced by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Charles Elbaum. The notion of replacing keyboard and mouse manipulated personal computers with a pen operated computer system was first introduced in the late 1980′s and at that time it created quite a storm in the techno world.
By the year 1991, numerous computer companies and especially Microsoft saw the early stylus as a challenge to the mouse and its potential replacement for good in the future. With this promising idea, Microsoft launched their Pen Extension for Windows 3.1 by the name of Windows for Pen Computing. Many companies proposed and presented their modifications of PenPoint after the first bold step had been taken by Microsoft and between 1992 and 1994, various popular companies introduced hardware for the software launched by Microsoft. After this initial boom, the hype surrounding the pen computing system and handwriting recognition technology died because the new idea did not sell and companies suffered losses. By 1995 most people thought that this was the end of the electronic pen and it was seen as a threat to the conventional mouse and keyboard no more.
Bill Gates was one who had always firmly believed in the pen computing system and had not given up hope on it as the future of computers. Pen operative computing systems made a major comeback in the year 2002 with the launch of the Tablet PC in the form of slates and convertibles from Microsoft. One of the major reasons why it was successful this time around Read the rest of this entry »