I Found a Weird Touch Screen iMac G3 

Groose couldn't bring them down!

Hehe

Darn, you beat me to it! Great minds think alike, though, eh?!

I was hoping someone would make a joke like this

That was really out of the blue!

what are the odds, eh ?

Well you got to remember Mac is made with only one mouse button in mind instead of two like Windows.

I have been using Mac OS X with a touchscreen for the past couple of years once I found a compatible one. I'm going to have to take the system out and turn it on cause I think there's a way to right click.

And lets not overlook the most prolific and ubiquitous CRT touch screen device that predates modern devices, but is still widely in use today: The ATM Granted, most of these machines have since been retro-fitted or upgraded to LCD technology, but try to imagine life without them in the 90s and early 2000s.

Definitely existed way before smartphones, difference tech though. The most common and cheap ones are resistive touchscreens, which requires you to press down the screen with actual force(stylus for accuracy). Another common one is infrared touch sensor that doesn't need an extra overlay over the display, common on bigger interactive screens like kiosks, can malfunction if there's dust accumulation on the side of the screen.

I've seen an Apple //e with a touch screen in 1986.

@@MitchMatrixxMost ATMs I've seen back in the day weren't touchscreen-based.

They definitely have. Remember the touchscreen in the first Die Hard movie?

The first time I used a touch screen was 1979 (to move a chess piece) and I believe it employed a similar technology. Was on a PLATO terminal in a computing lab at the University of Illinois, so there may have been patent concerns (would have cost money to license) as well as political (Jobs reportedly hated anything to do with the Newton) and artistic (Jobs again) in the decision for Apple not to do this. Still, a neat piece of kit and well presented.

How does the touch sensor detect finger swipes and releases? Do they generate vibrations? How do you distinguish between a touch and a release?

​@@nyanpasu64that's what I'd like to know, as well! Both the video's and George's blurbs about the tech don't make this clear

Yes, it's elastic waves a.k.a. vibrations. The wave time reversal property is manifested if one records the scattered waves from an unknown source in a domain, reverse the obtained signal (flip it chronologically) and resend it, then the waves will backpropagate taking the exact same path (only in reverse) and refocus uniquely at the location of the unknown source. Take the example of a pond, where you throw a rock. Waves/ripples will emerge from the entry point and start propagating to the shore. If we could measure the wave height at some locations along shore throughout the process, flip the signal and regenerate the waves from these points, then the recreated signal would refocus/peak at the rock's entry point uniquely. In the case of the screen, the backpropagation is not performed in practice. I believe the engineers have a library of signals from all possible tap points on the screen, and match it with the input you give at any given time. Still, the uniqueness of the match relies on the validity of wave time reversal. Prof. Mathias Fink is the pioneer behind the technique that has found application in many fields, from medicine to geosciences and wireless communications. I recommend that you do a quick search for his lecture at HKUST; it's very interesting! Lastly, engineers have used the same technique to develop screens with haptic feedback. In that case, the perimeter emits a wave (backpropagation is performed) and the signal refocuses under your finger.

MJD's video shows a diagram where the touch sensor is both emitting SAWs and receiving them, rather than listening for vibrations created by the finger's movement. So that's a thing I guess...

I remember LGR did a video on one made by IBM Edit : found it ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QEZEVy6aIww.html

Even hp had one

Hah awesome!

I have seen touchscreen projectors before and I think it's a really cool idea

Back in the olden days, there was software that could run 68K Mac OS on an Amiga, and would use the Amiga's 68K natively. If you used one of the higher-tier Amigas, you could actually exceed the speed of the 68K Macs available at the time. Also, Debian Linux is available in 68K versions, and if you used either no desktop environment or the lightest available one (perhaps LXDE), you can run Linux on this ancient architecture. Also, you might be able to find BSD distributions available for 68K.

@@stgigamovement You could run Mac OS with that software but you'd have a harder time with Linux. Regular Linux requires an MMU and most of the Amigas don't have one.

@eDoc2020 OH on the topic of MMU and Classic Mac OS, it turns out that the popular PowerPC Classic Mac OS emulator SheepShaver for a very long time didn't support the MMU. The highest Mac OS Classic version that you could run on it was Mac OS 9.1. Some games like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets expect the final Mac OS 9 version of 9.2.2, and won't run on SheepShaver. Mind you, I haven't used SheepShaver in MANY years, but I still have my environment for it on one of my thumb drives, so if they added the MMU in the almost 10 years since I've used it, I could technically upgrade to 9.2.2. Also, SheepShaver does support the method in which Classic Mac OS on PowerPC will run 68K applications. That environment I have does actually contain some 68K software, such as a version of Monopoly made for the older black and white compact Macs. What's special about the version I have is that it actually implements several house rules people commonly add to Monopoly, such as the house rule in which Free Parking can give you money if you land there after some type of collection via something like Chance or Community Chest. Also, I had put Classilla on there, though it wasn't really usable for modern sites even in 2013. However, if your PowerPC Mac is able to run Mac OS X Tiger or better (better being Leopard or that elusive PowerPC beta of Snow Leopard), you can run InterWebPPC on it, which is a fork of relatively-modern Firefox tailored to run on PowerPC hardware, and it has different revisions for different types of PowerPC Macs. It has a G3 version, which is recommended also for use on Intel Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard's Rosetta 1 to browse the more modern web on. InterWebPPC also has two G4 versions, one for early G4 processors, and one for G4e processors that have AltiVec support (you'd often find this processor on later G4 machines like the Power Mac G4 MDD/Mirrored Drive Doors), and then you have the PowerPC G5 version, which, on something like a Power Mac G5 Cypher with its quad-core G5 and 16 gigabyte maximum of RAM and PCI-e slots, could actually play more intensive browser games. Now of course, if you're going to be browsing the modern web you probably will run into emoji at some point, and I'm not sure if InterWebPPC retains Firefox's Mozilla Twemoji. And that's nor even factoring in other Unicode characters standardized long after the heyday of these Macs. For such machines, I currently use the prototype of UnifontEX, my fork of GNU Unifont that focuses on high compatibility, which is currently a prototype until September 12th. Also, part of the compatibility stuff I did is to help it work on older Mac environments (so long as they support TrueType), so you could technically use it under Classic Mac OS.

Scratching the front of a modern CRT isn't that dangerous. The glass is thicker than it needs to be and if the glass does crack the implosion protection systems work quite well. CRTs (or at least the types in 60s and 70s TVs) also have a separate piece of glass glued over the actual CRT, which will act as the screen protector on a smartphone.

Probably for the same reason they still don't offer touchscreens or even Wacom Penabled screens on Macs: They didn't think touch input made sense for a desktop experience. I remember the keynote where Steve Jobs himself pooh-poohed the idea of reaching over the keyboard to poke at your screen.

@@stevethepocket Which, to be fair, is a good point. That's why it wasn't until screens got big (Both in size and resolutions) enough to hold a keyboard that touch screens became main stream.

​@@Toonrick12so the Palm Pilots?

@@hicknopunk I said touchscreens, not poke with a stick screens.

@@Toonrick12 lol

I believe there was a version of Simple Finder for OS X, though you needed a different user account for it (It was enabled via the Parental Controls, if I recall correctly)

Yes, Elo Touch has functional linux drivers

Total coincidence! I posted a picture of mine and he was like "wait you have one too"