🚀 go-pugleaf

A sales blurb from DEC just landed on my desk asking about DECtouch, which is
a really clever device.  It is a notebook-sized pressure-sensitive pad (with
a little box underneath it) upon which you place your monitor.  After a
calibration procedure, the pad senses the position of your finger on the
screen by the pressure that exerts through the base of the monitor.  No
weird membrane screen or anything like that; any old monitor now becomes
a touch screen.

The resolution spec is the thing that impresses me:  40 touch points *per
inch* and *256* different pressure levels.  Ignoring for the moment the
fact that your finger ain't gonna generate 256 different pressure levels
(at least not with any kind of consistent reproducibility), I wouldn't have
believed it was possible to derive that level of detail from such a physical
setup.  Nice.  Want.

I presume that touching the screen appears to the software as though some
mouse button got clicked at that location.  Correct?

The blurb only talks about bletcherous software like Windows and MS-DOS.
Will DECtouch work with a Unix workstation and X now or in the future?

AdTHANKSvance.

Terry R. Friedrichsen

terry@venus.sunquest.com  (Internet)
uunet!sunquest!terry      (Usenet)
terry@sds.sdsc.edu        (alternate address; I live in Tucson)