NEW YORK — For decades, the tablet computer was like a mirage in the technology industry: a great idea, seemingly reachable on the horizon, that disappointed as hopeful companies got closer. Microsoft has experienced this cycle of hope and disappointment many times.
The device unveiled by the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant on Monday — the Surface — isn’t the first tablet it envisioned. Indeed, the company’s engineers have been trying to reshape personal computing for as long as there’s been a PC.
The first PCs had keyboards, borrowed from the typewriter. But people quickly started wondering whether pens, which are more comfortable writing tools, wouldn’t be a better basis for personal computing.
Several companies worked pen-based computing in the late 1980s, and Microsoft jumped on the trend. By 1991, it released “Windows for Pen Computing,” an add-on to Windows 3.1 that let the operating system accept input from an active “pen” (really a stylus). Several devices used Microsoft’s software, and are recognizable as the ancestors of today’s tablets: They were square, portable slabs with a screen on one side. They weren’t designed to respond to finger-touches, however: the reigning paradigm was that of the notepad and pen.
The pen-computing fad subsided in the ’90s. While PenWindows tablets got a lot of attention, mainstream computing remained stubbornly keyboard-based.
In 2002, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said these early tablet ventures were “almost painful to recall,” but not to worry. He had something much better, a device that would fulfill “a dream that I and others have had for years and years,” he said. It was Windows for XP Tablet PC Edition. This time, hardware makers such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Samsung Electronics, Toshiba Corp. and Acer Group played along, producing tablet PCs.
Like the earlier generation, some of these looked like today’s tablets, but inside, they were really PCs. Compared with an iPad, they were expensive — at around $1,500 — heavy, and didn’t last long on battery power. Buyers paid a lot for the ability to enter things on the screen with a pen.
Another problem was that the pen-based adaptations were skin-deep. Windows remained a thoroughly keyboard-and-mouse-based operating system, and many functions were simply hard to get to with a pen. Third-party applications weren’t converted for pen use at all. As a backup, many of these tablets had keyboards, just like laptops.
Microsoft gave tablets another try in 2006, launching “Project Origami” with some of its partners. The idea was to make really small PCs with screens sensitive not just to pens, but to fingers. This time, fewer companies followed along. One of them was Samsung, which had high hopes for its “Q1.”
But Microsoft hadn’t learned much from its Tablet PC adventure. Windows was still hard to use with anything other than a keyboard. The “Ultra-Mobile PCs” were still expensive and suffered from very short battery life — the Q1 could surf the Web for about 2 hours. One thing they did get right was weight — the Q1 weighed 1.7 pounds, just a bit more than a first-generation iPad.
In 2008, reports emerged of yet another tablet computer, or rather a “booklet computer,” being developed by Microsoft. Code-named “Courier,” it had two screens joined by a hinge, and facing each other. It was designed for pen and finger input. Microsoft canceled the project in 2010, saying it was just one of many projects it tests to “foster productivity and creativity.”
The company that finally cracked the tablet code in 2010 was Apple, not Microsoft. Apple made the iPad a success by scaling up a phone rather than scaling down a PC, which is what Microsoft had been trying to do with the Tablet PC and Origami. Phone chips are cheap and last much longer on batteries, which meant that the iPad was both light, inexpensive and had good battery life. In addition, the iPhone software it used was designed from the ground up for touch input.
Microsoft’s new strategy is similar. For Windows 8, it’s borrowing design features from Windows Phone, its new smartphone system. Most importantly, one version of the software is designed to run on phone-style chips, rather than the PC-style chips that have been the mainstay of Windows since it was created in the 1980s. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can make its tablet vision a reality, or if it will stay a mirage.
