Touchscreens are everywhere today. You might be using one right now to read this article, thanks to the spread of mobile devices. Every technology has its starting point, and the first commercial examples of touchscreens date back to the 1980s. Thanks to YouTube and digital preservation, a 1982 episode of Tomorrow’s World shows us how they were back then.
If you enjoy retro tech, you might like our stories on virtual reality in 1957, Home Office de 2001, and AT&T's attempt at video calling with its Picturephone in 1970.
Technically, the first phone to use a touchscreen was the IBM Simon, which many also consider the first smartphone thanks to its built-in personal assistant features. Still, to find the practical origins of the touchscreen, we need to go back a bit further.
The clip from Tomorrow’s World, a BBC show from 1982, demonstrates one of the first examples of touchscreens that would later appear in products like the HP-150, launched in November 1983. The prototype's touchscreen consisted of a set of photodiodes and photoreceptors arranged around the screen's edges.
This creates a kind of infrared grid; when the user passes a finger over it, the system detects the interruption and turns it into a command. The lack of graphical interfaces limited the usefulness of the infrared touchscreen on the desktop, but as a proof of concept for controlling machinery, it was on the right track.
The first demonstrations of touchscreens at point-of-sale terminals would come in 1986, and a year later Casio released its PB-1000 hybrid with a total of 16 'keys' on the screen arranged in a 4x4 grid. Other rumors floating around the web suggest that Sega had planned a successor to the Game Gear with a touchscreen, but production costs made it prohibitive, so they chose the Sega Nomad, a commercial failure that never left the United States.
If you want to know more about the HP-150, you can watch the full presentation below. It's a sober presentation, lacking the hype with which tech products are shown these days.
