[LINK] "The 1977 Tablet Computer That Took Up an Entire Room"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Greg Miller observes how the very first tablet computer produced was actually not very portable at all. The progress between then and now is remarkable.

In the late ’70s, researchers at MIT built a tablet that filled an entire room, and there it is in the images above and the video below. It was called the Spatial Data Management System, and although it was enormous, it was an awful lot like a modern tablet or smartphone. It had a touch screen, voice recognition, and multiple apps. It could even make phone calls.

The idea behind the system is simple: We humans are inherently spatial thinkers. “People are really natural explorers of space and manipulators of space,” says William Donelson, who created the system as part of his masters thesis in MIT’s Machine Architecture Group, the predecessor to today’s Media Lab. “If you wander around your city or your neighborhood, you’ll remember where things are, and I wanted to incorporate that concept into a database.”

Donelson says the team wanted to build a user interface that could mimic the way people organize files on a physical desktop. They weren’t the only ones working on this idea at the time: engineers at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto developed an experimental computer with a desktop interface in the mid-70s and released a commercial version in 1981.

But Donelson’s Spatial Data Management System had a certain grandeur that those clunky boxes lacked. The user sat in a large armchair dubbed the “Captain Kirk Chair,” with dual touchpads and joysticks built into each arm. Two touchscreens—boxy Tektronix color monitors on rolling carts—were positioned on either side, just within reach. One presented what we’d now call the homescreen, an assortment of brightly-colored boxes that opened up different programs when poked by the user. The apps included a calculator, maps, a book reader, and photo and video viewers.

The brains behind all this was network of four minicomputers, packing up to 640KB of combined processing power and 640MB of memory in the original version (more on the tech specs here). The display was a 6 by 8 foot television screen directly in front of the user, and 8 speakers positioned around the room provided surround sound.