The First Ever Touchscreen Computer?

#retro #retrocomputing #oldpc #HP-150 #touchscreen
The HP-150 was the worlds first. A commercially available touch screen MS-DOS computer from 1983.
HP wanted desperately to differentiate themselves from the rest of the growing home computer market, so did something that no one else had though of to this point - they made it so that the user interacted with the display via touch.
I hope you enjoy this video, I certainly enjoyed making it.
Adrian's teardown of his HP-150 can be found here:
• Touch Screen MS-DOS PC...
If you own an HP-150 and are in need of software please checkout this link:
www.hpmuseum.ne...
Music:
"Shades of Spring" & "Airport Lounge" - Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
creativecommons....

[@anthonyandreoli4700]

A truly interesting piece of kit. Great video as always!

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

Thanks mate!

[@ianpolpo]

This is a nice overview of the HP-150, which holds a special place in my heart. My dad's architectural office was full of them, running AutoCAD. As a kid I remember pointing at something on the screen not knowing it was a touchscreen, and wound up doing something that my dad had a hard time undoing...
Several years later as a teenager I wound up using an old one from his office as a dumb terminal using the terminal built into ROM. I also played around in DOS on it, though I couldn't do much as I only had a couple pieces of software. One of them was the demo program that you show in your video.
AFAIK it was one of the very first PCs to use the soon ubiquitous 3.5" floppy disk. In the stack of disks you show, I see a couple of the early ones with the shutter that could latch in place.

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

Thanks for sharing! You’re right on the floppy drives - depending on where you look it was either the first or one of the first commercially available micros to use them

[@dave4shmups]

Excellent video on this cool PC

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

Thanks, and you’re right; it is super cool

[@angieandretti]

I would REALLY love to see the special build of Windows running on one of these. Wonder how difficult it would be to implement a hard drive with modern tricks and hardware. Any thoughts?

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

Probably quite difficult as the expansion module is needed to convert from whatever interface the drive is to the HP-IB bus

[@Spookieham]

From the days when HP meant quality, engineering excellence and bugger the price.

[@kkon5ti]

Unpopular opinion: Win 8 was ahead if its time and a great concept. Just… poorly made.

[@CelentAle]

I've been thinking about it for a long time.

[@aminesheridi995]

can you share the ms dos version specific to this PC Plz

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

Hi, you can find the disk images on archive.org

[@SH1KAKAA]

Great video as always mate 👍

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

Thanks man

[@grahamlees263]

It's possible to emulate hard and floppy disk drives using a pc with a gpib card. This should allow you to try out Windows on the 150. Nice video; thank you for making it.

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

That's really useful information to know! I looked for a hard disk module in the usual places and they ain't cheap!

[@grahamlees263]

The software is called HPdrive. It works with Windows but is a bit fussy about the GPIB card. I use a Windows 200 machine with an old ISA card. It works with a lot of HP stuff.