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Apple’s Tablet Computer History

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The iPad has been a long time coming. Apple has produced innumerable tablet computer prototypes and of course developed and released the much-maligned and much-beloved iPad precursor, the Messagepad2000/2001 a decade ago. There are some nifty designs outlined in this retrospective of Apple tablets but sadly, lack of advancement in flat screen technology made them largely a pipe dream at the time. Steve Jobs, however, was very interesting in putting Apple’s R&D fully behind developing LCD monitors back in the 80s, and if the board had let him, it may have changed the mobile computing timeline substantially.

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David Adams

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8 Comments

  1. 2010-11-12 12:38 am
    Adurbe

    Very nice showcase of old designs. Incredible how dates they all look ;)

    Its a shame (but the reason is clear) that the images stop at ’93

  2. 2010-11-12 1:58 am
    polaris20

    though this made me chuckle:

    *Please note: iOS Safari (iPad/iPhone/iPod) is limited to loading just the first 6-6.5 MB of images on a webpage. To see all images, please use another browser. Thank you.*

    Why on Earth for that amount of pictures on a blog post do they equal 6MB? Is the author’s Picasa/GIMP/iPhoto broken? LOL

    • 2010-11-12 7:07 am
      WorknMan

      Well, whatever the case, I was happy to see they put it all on 1 page instead of 20. You don’t see that much anymore.

      • 2010-11-12 2:57 pm
        polaris20

        Well that’s very true.

  3. 2010-11-12 8:59 am
    wigry

    The reason why all the attempts before iPad failed was that there was nothing to do with those computers. There was no fast mobile internet to consume media as thats pretty much the only thing iPad can be used. Also the electronics wasn’t advanced enough to allow games and videos to be played on such a device. All other tasks are much more comfortable to be done behind desktop computer even in the era of iPad.

    • 2010-11-14 2:51 pm
      bornagainenguin

      wigry claimed…

      All other tasks are much more comfortable to be done behind desktop computer even in the era of iPad.

      Reading? It was easier to read off a crt monitor running at 60mhz than it would have been for an LCD display to show text?

      Really?

      –bornagainpenguin

      • 2010-11-14 6:06 pm
        Neolander

        All other tasks are much more comfortable to be done behind desktop computer even in the era of iPad.

        Reading? It was easier to read off a crt monitor running at 60mhz than it would have been for an LCD display to show text?

        Really?

        –bornagainpenguin

        Well

        1/Computers have LCD displays too, you know…

        2/I don’t know of any CRT monitor with a 60 mHz refresh rate, but at 85-100 Hz I actually found CRTs more comfortable to read than current LCDs, especially those of the shiny kind.

        Edited 2010-11-14 18:11 UTC