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U.S. Patent granted to Elisha Gray on electrical stylus device for capturing handwriting.
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U.S. Patent on handwriting recognition user interface with a stylus.
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U.S. Patent on touchscreen for handwriting input.
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Vannevar Bush proposes the Memex, a data archiving device including handwriting input, in an essay 'As We May Think'.
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Tom Dimond demonstrates the Styalator electronic tablet with pen for computer input and software for recognition of handwritten text in real-time.
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The RAND Tablet is better known than the Styalator, but was invented later.
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Alan Kay of Xerox PARC proposed a notebook computer, optionally using pen input, called the Dynabook: however the device is never constructed or implemented with pen input.
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Pencept of Waltham, Massachusetts markets a general-purpose computer terminal using a tablet and handwriting recognition instead of a keyboard and mouse.
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Pencept and CIC both offer PC computers for the consumer market using a tablet and handwriting recognition instead of a keyboard and mouse. Operating system is MS-DOS.
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The first commercially available tablet-type portable computer was the GRiDPad from GRiD Systems, released in September. Its operating system was based on MS-DOS.
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Wang Laboratories introduces Freestyle. Freestyle was an application that would do a screen capture from an MS-DOS application, and let the user add voice and handwriting annotations. It was a sophisticated predecessor to later note-taking applications for systems like the Tablet PC.[30] The operating system was MS-DOS
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GO Corporation announced a dedicated operating system, called PenPoint OS, featuring control of the operating system desktop via handwritten gesture shapes.
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The IBM releases the ThinkPad, IBM's first commercialized portable tablet computer product available to the consumer market, as the IBM ThinkPad 750P and 360P
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The "QBE" pen computer created by Aqcess Technologies wins Comdex Best of Show.[
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Bill Gates of Microsoft demonstrates the first public prototype of a Tablet PC (defined by Microsoft as a pen-enabled computer conforming to hardware specifications devised by Microsoft and running a licensed copy of the "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition" operating system at Comdex.
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On Disney Channel Original Movie, Read It and Weep, Jamie uses a tablet pc for her journal.
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The gesture features of the Windows/Tablet PC operating system and hardware were found to infringe on a patent by GO Corp. concerning user interfaces for pen computer operating systems.
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Asus announces a tablet netbook, the EEE PC T91 and T91MT, the latter which features a multi-touch screen.
