Comment by paco3346
6 years ago
I'm mostly surprised by the number of pen input elements 95 had. I was still a kid at the time so I didn't have any exposure to more advanced hardware. How common was it?
6 years ago
I'm mostly surprised by the number of pen input elements 95 had. I was still a kid at the time so I didn't have any exposure to more advanced hardware. How common was it?
Windows 95 was developed at a time when people thought that Pen computing would be the next big thing so they put in a lot of pen stuff that eventually was barely used. It always stayed a niche.
Maybe now is the time for it to come back? Windows 2-in-1 devices with a pen are magical these days, but there's far too little well-designed pen-oriented applications.
(I'm worried this won't improve until web folks fix the broken pointer events APIs, and even then it'll only lead to proliferation of pen-oriented Electron apps.)
It was used heavily on PDAs and similar devices until iPhone came to the scene and introduced "proper" touch.
Of course, those ran WinCE usually. But I don't think pen input code was any different.
A special build of Windows 3.1 called "Windows for Pen Computing" was made in the early 90s for very early tablet PCs. I'm guessing they rolled that stuff into the mainline build of 95.