Some technology is older than you probably think.

Much of it has a convoluted  history.
The people, universities and companies who have the ideas first, do the research, design the devices or produce the first working proto-type rarely receive the kudos they deserve.

The credit is usually claimed by those who are more vocal or those that create more profit. This article is quite long so use the quick links below to jump to the sections you are interested in.

So far it covers the history and development of:

• TrackBalls and Mice
• Graphical user interface
• Touchscreens
• Multi-touch
• Handwriting recognition
• Speech recognition
• On-line Music
• Peer to Peer

TrackBalls and Mice

The track ball was designed by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff as part of the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR system in 1952 .  That was eleven years before the mouse was invented and like trackballs today it was a secret. Because of its status as a secret it was not patented.

Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype in 1963.

The first commercially marketed mouse shipped as a part of a computer, the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981. (in the image - very ergonomic )

Mice remained relatively obscure until the Apple Macintosh was released in 1984 .

John C. Dvorak, San Francisco Examiner, 19 February 1984 in reference to the mouse:

“There is no evidence that people want to use these things"

 To say John was wrong would be a slight understatement.

Graphical User Interface

The precursor to GUIs was invented by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute, led by Douglas Engelbart. They developed the use of text-based hyperlinks manipulated with a mouse for the On-Line System.

The concept of hyperlinks was further refined and extended to graphics by researchers at Xerox PARC, who went beyond text-based hyperlinks and used a GUI as the primary interface for the Xerox Alto  in 1973. It was the first computer to use the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI).

Most modern general-purpose GUIs are derived from this system. The PARC User Interface consisted of graphical elements such as windows, menus, radio buttons, check boxes and icons.

In 1974, work began on Gypsy, the first bitmap What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) cut & paste editor. In 1975, Xerox engineers demonstrated a Graphical User Interface "including icons and the first use of pop-up menus"

In 1979, Apple Computer's founder Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, where he was shown the Smalltalk-80 programming environment, networking, and most importantly the mouse-driven graphical user interface provided by the Alto.

He reportedly was excited by the GUI and promptly integrated it — first into the Apple Lisa and then in the Macintosh, inviting several key Xerox researchers to work in his company. In 1984 the Macintosh, became the first commercially successful product to use a GUI.
Microsoft began a project named "Interface Manager" that was first presented to the public in 10 November 1983 and was later renamed to "Microsoft Windows" the two years of delay before release led many to believe that it was "vaporware". Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and was a GUI for the MS-DOS operating system. Windows 2.0 followed in 1987 introducing more sophisticated keyboard-shortcuts and the terminology of "Minimize" and "Maximize".

Touchscreens

Touchscreens emerged from academic and corporate research labs in the second half of the 1960s. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the first (1960s) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the early 1970s, there were 1,000 terminals worldwide.

Touchscreens were incorporated into a computer-assisted learning terminal that came out in 1972 as part of the PLATO project.

The HP-150 from 1983 was probably the world's earliest commercial touchscreen computer. It used a 9" Sony CRT surrounded by infrared transmitters and receivers which detect the position of any non-transparent object on the screen.

Multi-touch

A device similar to Microsofts "Surface" was seen in the 1982 movie Tron. It took up an executive's entire desk and was used to communicate with the Master Control computer. Many papers were published on the concept of mult-itouch displays after the developement of the touch display, but it took many years until Nimish Mehta of the University of Toronto to produce the first finger pressure multi-touch display in 1982 allowing computer users to control graphical applications with several fingers.
 

In 1984 Bell Labs engineered a touch screen that could change images with more than one hand.
In 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch “Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and pinching motions.

In 1999, Fingerworks, a  company run by John Elias and Wayne Westerman, produced a line of multi-touch products including the iGesture Pad and the TouchStream keyboard.

In 2001 Steve Bathiche and Andy Wilson of Microsoft began work on an idea for an interactive table that mixes both physical and virtual worlds. Research and Development expanded rapidly in 2004. 

In 2005 Fingerworks was acquired by Apple Inc.

In 2007 Microsoft introduced Microsoft Surface, a functional multi-touch table-top computer.

HP Touchsmart an All-In-One PC introduced Hewlett-Packard and was first released in 2007. It is the first mass marketed 'touch screen' PC made commercially available.

In 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone,  the first time multi-touch technology was used on a phone

In April 2009, Sharp unveiled the first laptop with an optical-sensor LCD pad. The optical-sensor LCD technology combines LCD and CCD elements within its pixels and can detect fingers and objects such as a stylus and is claimed to be able to scan a business card placed on top of the screen and further improvements to this function are expected to enable fingerprint authentication in the future

Handwriting Recognition

Goldberg, Hyman Eli "Controller", United States Patent 1,117,184, November 17, 1914
Cited in Tappert's patent list of 1986 on on-line/dynamic: handwriting recognition Very early patent on handwriting recognition: conductive ink written on paper dots triggers adding certain weighted values for the dots. Very early patent on handwriting recognition: happens to show constrained writing of numerals (around dot patterns), segmentation into what looks like chain codes

1915: U.S. Patent on handwriting recognition user interface with a stylus (Very early patent on handwriting recognition: writing on 7-segment sensor for Roman letters and Arabic numerals )

• 1957: Stylator tablet: Tom Dimond demonstrates electronic tablet with pen for computer input and handwriting recognition
• 1961: RAND Tablet invented (image below): better known than earlier Stylator system
• 1962: Computer recognition of connected/script handwriting
• 1969: GRAIL system: handwriting recognition with electronic ink display, gesture commands
• 1973: Applicon CAD/CAM computer system using the Ledeen recognizer for handwriting recognition.
• 1980s: Retail handwriting-recognition systems: Pencept and CIC both offer PC computers for the consumer market using a tablet and handwriting recognition instead of a keyboard and mouse. Cadre System markets Inforite point-of-sale terminal using handwriting recognition and a small electronic tablet and pen.
• 1989: Portable handwriting recognition computer: GRiDPad from GRiD Systems.

Commercial products incorporating handwriting recognition as a replacement for keyboard input were introduced in the early 1980s.

The first Items produced using this tech were from PenCept, CIC and a few others. PenPoint produced its own operating system developed by GO Corp.. The first commercially available tablet-type portable computer was the GRiDPad from GRiD Systems, released in September 1989.

Its operating system was based on MS-DOS. It has been reported that it gave Jeff Hawkins the idea for the Palm Pilot.

The ThinkPad  used IBM's handwriting recognition (1992). This recognition system was later ported to Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing, and IBM's Pen for OS/2. None of these were commercially successful.

The first PDA to provide written input was the Apple Newton The device was not a commercial success, due to the unreliability of the software.

Palm later launched a successful series of PDAs based on the Graffiti recognition system. The Graffiti handwriting recognition was found to infringe on a patent held by Xerox, and Palm replaced Graffiti with a licensed version of the CIC handwriting recognition which, while also supporting unistroke forms it pre-dated the Xerox patent.

Speech Recognition

Speach recognition is an idea older than computers, it is found in science fiction and literature dating back many many decades. No individual or company can rightly claim it was their idea or developement. Dragon , however produced the first reliable, commercial and publicly available technology.

DRAGON

DRAGON, a research prototype produced by DARPA before 1982 was the predicessor to most of the modern commercial speach recognition software. The married couple Dr. James Baker and Dr. Janet Baker founded Dragon Systems in 1982, deciding to commercialize DRAGON when their funding was cut by DARPA. Dr. James Baker was a pioneer in Hidden Markov models, a way of using statistics for recognition of speech. Dr. Janet Baker developed the expert system named Hearsay.

They went on to produce:

• The first speech recognition capability for a portable PC, in 1984.
• The world's first commercially available large vocabulary general purpose dictation system for PCs, in 1990.
• The world's first commercially available "software-only" dictation system that supports virtually any Windows application, in 1993.
• The world's first large vocabulary general purpose continuous speech recognition dictation system for PCs, in 1997

DragonDictate was the original speech recognition application from Dragon Systems and used discrete speech where "you - pause - between - each - word -you - say".

In March of 1990, Dragon Systems began selling DragonDictate (for DOS) at a cost of $9000 for a single-user license.

In 1997 the price of DragonDictate for Windows was about $2000

In 1997 advances in hardware technology allowed NaturallySpeaking version 1.0 to launch as the first available continuous dictation system, and further drop the price.

IBM developed a competing product named VoiceType. In 1997, ViaVoice, based on VoiceType, was first introduced to the general public.
Lernout & Hauspie bought Dragon Systems in June of 2000 for stock then valued at about $600 million.

In 2001, and Lernout & Hauspie went bankrupt and ScanSoft Inc. bought the rights to Dragon products.
In 2003, IBM gave ScanSoft, which owned the competitive product Dragon NaturallySpeaking, exclusive global distribution rights to ViaVoice Desktop products for Windows and Mac OS X.

ScanSoft merged with Nuance Communications, and changed the name of the combined entity to Nuance.

Apple

Apple released the PlainTalk package in 1993.  Although available for all PowerPC Macintoshes and AV 68k machines it was not part of the default system install prior to Mac OS X. The user had to do a custom installation of the OS to get any speech recognition capabilities. Apple's speech recognition is voice-command oriented, i.e. not intended for dictation.

Microsoft

Microsofts research was intended for dictation and for voice command. Microsofts research led to the development of the Speech API (SAPI).  The first version of SAPI was released in 1995, and was supported on Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51. This version included low-level Direct Speech Recognition and Direct Text To Speech APIs

Speech recognition technology has been used in many Microsoft products, including Microsoft Dictation (a research prototype that ran on Windows 9x). It was also included in Office XP, Office 2003, Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, and Windows Mobile (as Microsoft Voice Command)

Most users however were unaware that the functionality was available.

Prior to Windows Vista, speech recognition was not mainstream. In response, Windows Speech Recognition was bundled with Windows Vista and released in 2006, making the operating system the first mainstream version of Microsoft Windows to offer fully-integrated support for speech recognition.

On-line Music

The Internet's first free high fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs was the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA)  It was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.

Cductive founded in 1996 by Thomas V. Ryan, John Rigos, and Alan Manuel. It sold 99 cent mp3 downloads and custom CD compilations from a selection of several hundred independent record labels. In December 1999, the company was acquired by main rival eMusic

eMusic (January, 1998 - then called Goodnoise) in February 1998 it sold the first MP3 players on the internet.

MP3.com was co-founded in November 1997 by Michael Robertson and Greg Flores The vast majority of content on MP3.com was posted by unsigned or independent musicians and producers.  The  Market - MP3.com went public on July 21, 1999 and raised over $370 million. At that time, this was the single largest technology IPO to date. The stock was offered at $28 per share, rose to $105 per share during the day and closed at $63.3125.

At the end of 1999, MP3.com launched a promotion called "Pay for Play," or P4P, involving an algorithm to pay each MP3.com artist on the basis of the number of streams and downloads of their songs. Mp3.com actually tried to play within the rules, A staff of trained music experts reviewed all content prior to publication to prevent uploads of pirated materials.Their final service was MyMp3.com which allowed users to listen to tracks on-line that they had purchased and verified. It enabled users to securely register their personal CDs.

Online music sales had already been proven viable and profitable by this point.

The record industry and major labels claimed that this service constituted unauthorized duplication and promoted copyright infringement. After court battles and a $200 million settlement the service was discontinued.

The big record companies refused the late 90's requests of MP3.com, Cductive and eMusic to sell digital song downloads. They eventually decided to start their own services, which they could control directly.

In 2000 Sony opened "The Store" Sony's pricing of US$3.50 per song combined with the fact that the  files expired and could not be played again without repurchase meant the service would quickly fail. (greedy litigious bastards)

The rise of piracy - Aaaaarrrghh !!!

It could be argued that the explosion of P2P and copyright infringement was boosted by the major record labels refusal to allow the first 3 services to include their catalogs.

Their preference to taking legal action against the other established services caused public concern and effectively meant many people would refuse to use the major labels subsequent services. The record industry backed services at the time were also over priced and too restrictive. (DRM)

Napster, a music and file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning made a major impact on the Internet scene during the year 2000, one year after its original release. Usage would peak in February 2001, with 26.4 million users.

(The global online population at this time was less than 400 million) .In July 2001, Napster would shut down its network to comply with an injunction. After which time The music industry would focus its legal attention on the users of P2P applications.

The iTunes Music Store opened on April 28, 2003, it may have come late to the party but was well positioned to provide the service.

Illegal down-loaders had reduced at the time due to a marked increased of active lawsuits brought by the RIAA, other competing services were denied access to the major labels catalogs or sued into oblivion by them and the major labels own services failed due to greed, consumer restrictions or bad PR.

All this, combined with the release of i-Tunes updates and its integration with Apples ipod mp3 player helped generate market share, customer confidence and support.

Apple is now the largest on-line retailer of digital music.

Peer to Peer

This section is more of a history time line, its interesting to see how p2p has evolved from free exchange to the development of anonimizing services.

• 1971 —  "Sneaker Net" was born with the 8-inch floppy disk, the first removable magnetic media developed by an IBM team led by David Noble. Removable media would became a target of media industry efforts against the sharing of intellectual property.
• 1978 — Ward Christensen's CBBS becomes the first Bulletin board system.
• 1979 — Usenet conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, Its primary purpose is to facilitate focused discussion threads within topical categories (Usenet newsgroups), but it also allows the transfer of files.  alt.binaries.* newsgroups continue to serve files today.
• 1985 — File Transfer Protocol is standardized, FTP allows files to be efficiently uploaded and downloaded from a central server.
• 1988/08 — Internet Relay Chat is created by Jarkko Oikarinen. IRC users can exchange files via Direct Client-to-Client.(DCC an IRC sub-protocol enabling peers to interconnect)
• 1990 — The World Wide Web is formally proposed by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau
• 1998 --- Audiogalaxy is created by Michael Merhe. Initially an FTP search engine, the Audiogalaxy Satellite P2P client would reach 1 million downloads in 2001. In May 2002, a suit by the RIAA would force Audiogalaxy to block sharing of illegal songs.
• 1999/06 — Napster is created by Shawn Fanning. Napster used a centralized structure where indexing and searching is performed on Napster servers.
• 2000 — Gnutella becomes the first decentralized file sharing network with the release of a network client by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft
• 2000 — Freenet is created by Ian Clarke. Its goal is to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network which focuses on protecting anonymity. Files are distributed across the computers of Freenet's users. Ian Clarke's paper would become the most-cited computer science paper of 2000. Freenet would become a darknet in 2008.
• 2000 — eDonkey2000 client and server software is released by Jed McCaleb, introducing hashing into decentralized file sharing.
• 2001 — Kazaa and the FastTrack proprietary protocol are released by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and Priit Kasesalu. The Kazaa client came bundled with malware.
• 2001 — BitTorrent released by Bram Cohen.
• 2001 — GNUnet is first publicly announced. Goals are anonymous, censorship-resistant file-sharing, allowing users to anonymously publish or retrieve information of all kinds.
• 2002 — First release of Shareaza by Michael Stokes, Shareaza connects to multiple networks and protocols.
• 2002 — Gnutella2 protocol is announced.
• 2003 — RIAA files suit against individuals allegedly sharing files on Kazaa.
• 2004 — Winny developer Isamu Kaneko is arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation
• 2004 — The RIAA files an additional 750 lawsuits aimed at alleged copyright violations from file sharing.
• 2005 — Avalanche BitTorrent alternative is proposed and it is later criticized by Bram Cohen, the author of the original BT protocol.
• 2005 — Grokster developers are found guilty by the United States Supreme court of encouraging copyright infringement
• 2005 — WinMX servers owned by Frontcode are shut down due to a cease and desist letter from the RIAA
• 2008 — Freenet Darknet rewrite is released.
• 2009 — OneSwarm is released it is a privacy-preserving P2P client developed at the University of Washington. Although backwards compatible with BitTorrent, it also includes new features designed to protect user privacy.
• 2009 — Bitblinder goes in to public beta a program that allows users to share each other's bandwith and ip address in order to anonymously download torrents and browse the internet.
• 2009 --- The Pirate Bay ( at the time the worlds largest bit torrent tracker) is reported as being sold to Global Gaming Factory. Later in the year the sale falls through.
• 17 November 2009 - The Pirate Bay announces on its blog that it has shut down the bit torrent tracker of the site for good. The blog indicates that magnet links and DHT/PEX are reliable technologies which make the tracker service redundant. The closing of the tracker service was also influenced by legal action, the founders of TPB were fined earlier in the year but those  fines may be reduced because of TPB's recent changes. (migration to magnet links and closing of the tracker) 

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