Celebrities launch Tablet PC
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Microsoft's long-awaited Tablet PC launch event was a celebration for the company and its enigmatic Chairman, Bill Gates, who had taken this project under his wing. The event featured the usual Microsoft kitsch, with rolling demo tables, plenty of videos, and an interesting collection of celebrities. It was the biggest product rollout the company has staged since its gala Windows XP Launch last year.
Gates walked launch attendees through a history of the devices that led to the Pocket PC, beginning with the Memex, a theoretical computing device invented in 1945 that was designed to look up information, record thoughts, and share them with other people. "It looks like a Tablet PC," Gates joked of the mechanical monstrosity. Gates had a hand in the next major innovation in this space, the Tandy Model 100, a portable favored by journalists in the early 1980's that featured 4 lines of 20 text characters and 32 KB of RAM. "The Tandy's ROM was written by me and one other person," Gates noted. "It was the last Microsoft product on which I did most of the work." Gates actually mentioned the ill-fated Go Corporation, a company from the early 1990's that pioneered a pen-based system that was destroyed when Microsoft decided to drop support and develop its own, suspiciously similar pen-based system. The Microsoft product--Pen for Windows--sold poorly, Gates says, because the hardware and software of the day wasn't up to the challenge.