Videos and pictures of some interesting items in my collection.

1988: Wang Freestyle electronic ink / voice annotation application.

This is demonstrated by Dr. Stephen Levine, my boss on the Freestyle project at Wang Laboratories.

Freestyle was an application that would take a screen capture from a DOS application, and let you add handwriting and voice annotations to it. There was no handwriting recognition: as a whiteboard application, it was very sophisticated at the time. I think Wang found only one customer for the product.

1989: IBM "Paper-like Interface", demonstrations of various prototype applications.

I visited Dr. Charles Tappert at IBM at about the same time. Dr. Tappert developed the handwriting recognizer used in the application demonstrations. The small research group there had developed a few different pen-computing applications as prototypes. The operating system was DOS: only the applications used pen computing, you had to use a keyboard to run the operating system.

1991: Demonstration of PenPoint OS

While at Slate, I worked on applications for both the PenPoint OS, and Windows for Pen Computing -- that was the historical predecessor to the Tablet PC software that came out about ten years later. Here is a video demonstration from GO Corporation of the PenPoint OS.

Alan Kay and Dynabook

Alan Kay is well-known for the Dynabook proposal and for his conceptual work in the 1960's and 1970's on personal use of computers, particularly for education. He has given a number of talks over the years about his view of the history behind the ideas for a personal computer.

The videos are interesting, because they include segments from very early demonstrations of the RAND tablet, the GRAIL system, and other handwriting/gesture systems of the 1960's.

As Alan Kay himself said (in the 2008 Video), history is a slippery subject: For example, Alan Kay has said that the Dynabook concept included a touchscreen or tablet, but this was evidently a proposal made by another person person associated with Alan's research group at the time, and never carried out. Also, the RAND tablet was not the first electronic tablet: that could have been either the Styalator from the 1950's, or Eliza Gray's Telautograph from the late 19th century.

1983: Pencept PenPad M200 Handwriting Terminal

Here are several views of a Pencept PenPad M200 model: this was a no-keyboard, no-mouse "handwriting terminal" that was a direct replacement for the VT-100 computer terminal that was the de facto standard terminal in the late 70's and early 80's.
... you may want to download the images from the link, to see them full-size.

1986: Casio PF-8000-s calculator.

I have two of these in my personal collection: they still work. It is a one-of-a-kind design: rather than using a touchpad or digitizer, it uses a set of rubberized buttons on the right side: Casio got a patent on the use of buttons instead of a digitizer or touchscreen.

Copy of the sales brochure for the PF-8000s

This is one of the PF-8000s units in my collection:

Excerpts from Casio user's manual, showing elements of character recognition:

Here are some pictures of a working PenPoint "Hobbit" model in my collection.
(I also have a working Apple Newton, but they are relatively easy to find on eBay and elsewhere.)