30 Years Of Apple Technology On Computer Monitors

Hat tip to Karen Triggiani for this nostalgia:

When Apple launched the iPad earlier this year, it was the culmination of fans' long wait for the company to enter the tablet computer market. There's no doubt that Apple's iPad is a revolutionary computing device that's ushering in a new era of tablet computing.

But in 1979, an earlier generation of Apple users used a different kind of Apple tablet, back when the word meant something else entirely.

The Apple Graphics Tablet was designed by Summagraphics and sold by Apple Computer Inc. for the Apple II personal microcomputer. (Summagraphics also marketed the device for other platforms as the BitPad.) To be clear, this tablet was not a stand-alone computing device like the iPad. Instead, it was an input device for creating images on the Apple II's screen, and it predated the Apple II's mouse by six years.