History of Tablets The History Of The Tablet, An Idea That Steve Jobs Stole And Turned Into A Game-Changer (Bort, 2013). I am doing a research paper on the history of tablets. My question for this topic is whether Apple’s Ipad was the first tablet created or not. You will find out in the rest of this paper. Apple’s Ipad got most of the credited for killing the netbook market but it was not Steve Jobs’ idea (Bort, 2013). The first tablet was the Linus Write-Top that debuts in 1987. The Linus Write-Top revolutionized the way businesses check their databases. It is a “resistive” type of touchscreen in which voltage applies to the screen edges, and the stylus detects the voltage (Linus Write-Top, 2013). The Linus (“of or about lines”) converts your scrawls into perfect text of five characters per second (Linus Write-Top, 2013). It was an expensive piece of technology as most old computers were. The GridPad launched two years later in 1989. The military and law enforcement used it mostly while consumers ignored it because of the high price. The GridPad was the first touchscreen tablet that was portable. It was used primarily for experimental purposes and the like (GridPad, 2013). The United States military specified more rigidity than those sold to the public (GridPad, 2013). Microsoft’s CEO Bill Gates debuts its first tablet computer in 2000. It would become a big thing five years down the road as Bill Gates predicts. He was five years off. The device would feature input via stylus only, as an evolutionary step in the PC world (Fontana, 2010). In today’s world, the tablet is a big part of the way we live. The motion computing tablet PCLS800 came out in the mid-2000s. It was one of the most expensive and smallest tablets to come out in recent times. The device looks like a five by seven picture frame and weighs at 2.2 pounds. Because of the portability nature of the device, there are more security features such as a fingerprint reader and TPM (Trusted Platform Module) (Cheng, 2005).Consumers turned away from the device because of the high price and faulty machinery. As the years go on tablets can process more and more data and may replace computers. The world has changed since the tablets were introduced and now is involved in our lives on a daily basis. I wonder if there will be computers in the next decade or two.

References: * http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-tablet-2013-5 * http://oldcomputers.net/linus.html * http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6565/gridpad-1910/ * http://www.pcworld.com/article/187062/microsofts_history_with_the_tablet_pc.html * http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1834919,00.asp