I have been using Mac OS X with a touchscreen for the past couple of years once I found a compatible one. I'm going to have to take the system out and turn it on cause I think there's a way to right click.
Imagine a world where all tech companies, and their customer support, just lingered on forever and you could just contact them when you need help with decades-old devices
Damn, I've never had luck e-mailing a company about old software. That's awesome. EDIT: Actually that's a lie. I forgot about the time I e-mailed ART about the software for the EPP-1 EPROM programmer and they got back to me with DOS software, Windows 3.1 software, and a manual detailing the serial commands in case I wanted to use it on my own from terminal software.
That is not something I expected to see! I'm also glad some companies still keep and provide old software for older hardware, and that within a day! Seriously awesome stuff.
Contrary to popular belief, touch screens have existed way before smartphones. I remember these kiosk computers in our local mall in the 90s here in Brazil that were touch screen. You could see the map of the mall, find stores you were looking for, events coming up if they had any... they were neat!
And lets not overlook the most prolific and ubiquitous CRT touch screen device that predates modern devices, but is still widely in use today: The ATM Granted, most of these machines have since been retro-fitted or upgraded to LCD technology, but try to imagine life without them in the 90s and early 2000s.
Definitely existed way before smartphones, difference tech though. The most common and cheap ones are resistive touchscreens, which requires you to press down the screen with actual force(stylus for accuracy). Another common one is infrared touch sensor that doesn't need an extra overlay over the display, common on bigger interactive screens like kiosks, can malfunction if there's dust accumulation on the side of the screen.
Very cool technology! It is based on wave time reversal; in essence, every time you touch the screen you create waves that are sensed at the perimeter. Taps at different locations create different waves at the perimeter. Then the wave time reversal property is used to solve the inverse problem i.e., given the signal at the perimeter, where is the source/finger. My PhD was on a similar topic!
The first time I used a touch screen was 1979 (to move a chess piece) and I believe it employed a similar technology. Was on a PLATO terminal in a computing lab at the University of Illinois, so there may have been patent concerns (would have cost money to license) as well as political (Jobs reportedly hated anything to do with the Newton) and artistic (Jobs again) in the decision for Apple not to do this. Still, a neat piece of kit and well presented.
Yes, it's elastic waves a.k.a. vibrations. The wave time reversal property is manifested if one records the scattered waves from an unknown source in a domain, reverse the obtained signal (flip it chronologically) and resend it, then the waves will backpropagate taking the exact same path (only in reverse) and refocus uniquely at the location of the unknown source. Take the example of a pond, where you throw a rock. Waves/ripples will emerge from the entry point and start propagating to the shore. If we could measure the wave height at some locations along shore throughout the process, flip the signal and regenerate the waves from these points, then the recreated signal would refocus/peak at the rock's entry point uniquely. In the case of the screen, the backpropagation is not performed in practice. I believe the engineers have a library of signals from all possible tap points on the screen, and match it with the input you give at any given time. Still, the uniqueness of the match relies on the validity of wave time reversal. Prof. Mathias Fink is the pioneer behind the technique that has found application in many fields, from medicine to geosciences and wireless communications. I recommend that you do a quick search for his lecture at HKUST; it's very interesting! Lastly, engineers have used the same technique to develop screens with haptic feedback. In that case, the perimeter emits a wave (backpropagation is performed) and the signal refocuses under your finger.
MJD's video shows a diagram where the touch sensor is both emitting SAWs and receiving them, rather than listening for vibrations created by the finger's movement. So that's a thing I guess...
There was a burger king around where I lived that had those around the playground behind plastic facades. They very seldom worked though- most of the time I saw them they were turned off. Walmart also used to have the touch CRT monitors for their hiring kiosks as well.
I actually remember using one of these back in around 2003! It was at the Discovery Cove park in Florida being used as a kiosk to order photos/videos that had been taken of your group throughout the day. I remember being amazed/baffled by it - I was in primary (elementary) school at the time where iMac G3s were ubiquitous so it was amazing to me that these were touch screen whereas all the others I'd used up until that point weren't. Wasn't until years later that I remembered them, looked them up and found out that they were using the Elo system rather than being a complete product from Apple.
Your content is so much fun to watch, you're engaging and you find some WEIRD hardware to focus on! I'm glad MichaelMJD will be doing a video on that touchscreen tech, I've *never* heard of a touchscreen CRT even if it was fudged (in a very innovative way) into the iMac G3 chassis. I really love seeing these proto-versions of tech I use all the time. I was so excited for you to put this video out after watching the Patreon quick-look at this weird thing. But I'm always glad to see an upload from you. Have a great one man!
Well, you know as well as I do that there's only one thing left to do with this iMac... Upgrade it to a G4! (Along with upgrading the L2 cache to 1MB).
9:33 lol seeing this made me realize that my province didn't change it's name til 2001 lol We were Newfoundland but after that we became Newfoundland & Labrador (im from the Labrador part, the bit connected to Quebec physically). Man i wish we had touch on these back in the day, my uni had these Macs, they were fun when they arrived, its how i first saw the Star Wars Episode I trailer (Quicktime formatted trailer, and a projector later lol). Also 9:55 was a common sight on a friday night here in Canada in the 90s, the Royal Canadian Air Farce show on CBC, they used ot be radio-only with live recordings aired each weekend after 12 noon. 10:58 i had the Giant Sized X-Men #1 version of this disc (with the Incredible Hulk #181 first appearance of Wolverine comic as an added bonus), got it on clearance from my local Radio Shack in Goose Bay, and used it on the Windows 98 machine around 1997. I think the disc was able to do both Mac & Windows, something i had noticed on some demo discs from computer games magazines.
I saw a touch screen iMac G5 at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) in about 2013. Had the same USB cable drilled out the back so it could be plugged into the back.
Back when I was in grade 3 (2009) the school district in Kamloops BC actually used to have a bunch of G3's with debian and the old KDE desktop(they only ran the district on Linux), some of them had this touch screen support too! (And a dual boot with OS 9 at the time)
@@RealEpikCartfrenYT it was funny, one of the G3's (in orange) had HDD failure, but would netboot linux, and kick to another ramdisk OS (it just took WAY longer to boot)
I'm surprised that actually works so well. I personally thought of finding an old ELO monitor and using it as a graphics tablet for drawing stuff. I think i definitely SHOULD now get hold of a touchscreen monitor
I always have a weird nostalgia for ELO. In the original version of the MagiQuest attraction we used their touch screens nearly exclusively. The first location even had CRTs, though many of those got replaced with LCDs. The CRTs were not reliable at such long daily run cycles, and the burnin from our static patterns got really bad.
I have a couple of ELO LCD touch screens they are great and work just fine despite being a decade or so old. The acusticwave tracking was used by 3M when they made a touch screen projector in the early 2000’s. I was a repair engineer for them. It was under used and could have been so much more.
Touch screens have been around for a surprising length of time , it is just that the early ones were quite expensive and often not very useful as most software was just not compatible or not fully so.
Someone should make a port of doom to specifically take advantage of this thing. I know it's niche but if someone was willing to make a portrait mode version of doom for one monitor then I don't think this would be out of the question.
elo has been a major player in the touchscreen game for decades. Chances are that if you used any sort of touchscreen CRT, it was an elo product. I'd heard of these iMacs but have never seen one before, super neat!
I remember seeing a pallet of PS/2 touch-screen monitors, stil in their original boxes, at IBM Poughkeepsie (probably around 2009). I didn't know where they were headed, whether they were for some project or headed for scrap, but I was so tempted to grab one for myself. But a Canadian Encyclopedia? You should have at least used Infopedia. (now that I think of it I should have picked up that copy I saw at VCF East and handed it to you). I had tried getting a boxed version from my old boss at Future Vision Multimedia (along with some of our other titles).
I barely remember touch screens from before smartphones but I know these existed to me as well. Pretty cool to see despite we are of course used to it already these days 😅
I used to work for a company that sold kiosks which used touchscreens. They were LCDs rather than CRTs, but they did have an old touchscreen CRT in the corner of the office that they used to use for prototyping the software. From memory the LCDs had a capacitive touchscreen, and there was a stylus (on a string so it wouldn't get stolen) that the user could use to sign their name on the screen. It was super primitive, like it didn't have palm rejection, so you couldn't rest your hand on the screen while writing. That made it difficult to use since the screen was at about a 30° angle in the kiosk. We had to replace a few of the screens because they'd had the digitiser scratched up and it stopped working. Apparently in one instance there was an old lady with a huge diamond ring who was dragging it across the screen as she wrote with the stylus. That would be a LOT more dangerous with a CRT, since it could cause it to shatter and implode!
Scratching the front of a modern CRT isn't that dangerous. The glass is thicker than it needs to be and if the glass does crack the implosion protection systems work quite well. CRTs (or at least the types in 60s and 70s TVs) also have a separate piece of glass glued over the actual CRT, which will act as the screen protector on a smartphone.
Pretty cool. I love the iMac G3, we had a lab full of them in 1999 in school. I have a Bondi Blue Rev A, a Blue Dalmatian (the rarest perhaps) , and a G3 Blueberry.
What an interesting take on classic Mac hardware, and thanks for today's touch-screen shenanigans! This does remind me of my modern Dell Precision M3800 Hackintosh with a functioning touchscreen in OS X. It works great in regards to responsiveness and general accuracy, and it's rather novel to control the OS with your finger... But the caveat here is that the interface both then and now, simply hasn't been designed with touch-driven use in mind. The icons are too small and improperly spaced for a smooth experience. Eventually, developers would figure out creative solutions to this issue with the advent and proliferation of the touch smartphone; but I believe that so far, only Windows and Linux have responsive versions of their OS that adapt the UI for touch-driven use. Apple, being the stubborn stalwart that they are have yet to catch up in this area.... though I suspect there's a few builds of touchscreen macOS being test driven across the Apple campus 🤔
I'm sure there has to be touch screen drivers for doom and w3d that can be ported over from an iPad. Might have to modify, I'm guessing. Also as far as the plastics, I'm surprised no one has tried to 3d print at least the smaller parts. The specs have to be online somewhere, I'm thinking... great video as always...
I've been waiting 3 years for this video but I didn't even know it. I picked up two of these in New Hampshire off of Craigslist during peak Covid (one working, one non-working). Same exact model and color. I shamefully caused more damage trying to take apart the broken one thinking I could move the components to a working donor iMac, and learning how hard it is to disassemble an iMac in the process. I even mentioned having a spare one and offering it to Steve at VCF East but then I didn't (yet) reach out. Please reach out if you want another donor parts machine.
Dear goodness... this myth exists. I knew where was touch screen monitors this age, but I wonder just what it took to graft the sensors within the iMac's CRT bezel.
As soon as I heard it banging and beeping, I was like, "This is an ELO." I have one tied to my old dell GX260, a cast off from a factory. Damn good monitor but I never use the touch portion.
My shoulders are sobbing just watching you use that thing in a 15 minute video! I couldn't imagine actually sitting at a desk with something like that. Standing at a kiosk where the monitor was mounted at an ergonomic angle and distance would be another thing, but a regular workstation? Ugh.
Very interesting. It makes me wonder why Apple didn’t create products with touchscreens until the iPad (apple newton, notwithstanding). There was a company that sold a touchscreen kit for MacBooks to make them touchscreen capable (you may have done a video on those already- my memory isn’t so great), but they were very invasive to install. This seems to qualify as ‘magical’ to me. 😅
Probably for the same reason they still don't offer touchscreens or even Wacom Penabled screens on Macs: They didn't think touch input made sense for a desktop experience. I remember the keynote where Steve Jobs himself pooh-poohed the idea of reaching over the keyboard to poke at your screen.
@@stevethepocket Which, to be fair, is a good point. That's why it wasn't until screens got big (Both in size and resolutions) enough to hold a keyboard that touch screens became main stream.
What’s nuts is I have had an iMac DV with the Elo touch module for the last 20 years with original drivers. I should compare the driver versions uploaded to Macintosh Garden and if it’s different, upload it. Also, there are no OS X drivers for it. The condition of my Elo iMac is excellent as well.
Gotta give props to ELO, it's getting shitty out here to find drivers for old stuff, many times you're getting lucky to find a file name on the web archive, and then find it on an obscure FTP somewhere and then you have to use an older browser to download it. Sony, HP/Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, and so on have purged all their old support documents from the public facing internet, although humourously enough HP still has a public FTP with all the softpaqs on it just not a good means to locate which softpaqs you need similar story with Microsoft's Knowledgebase and the Update Catalog still having mostly everything in it back to Windows 2000, Compaq stuff from the late 90s I can still find file names in the webarchive, but the type of scripting and super long URL structure HP used in the early 2000s archived very poorly. I don't know if it's still the case but a decade ago when I needed Windows NT 3.x and NT4 updates I found the links in the webarchive and they were still active on Microsoft's servers just the download pages were gone.
I vaguely remember reading an article about this when it was first released. It was round about the same time that Apple started putting CD burners in the iMac and launched their Rip Mix Burn advertising campaign. I also remember reading that there were plans for one of the UK high street stores (WH Smith think) who were going to have self serve kiosks with these things for burning custom music CDs. There was also going to be a printer attached for the album artwork. I don't think it ever happened though. By the way, you should try this using MacOS 9's 'Simple Finder' feature. One of those really useful OS9 things that never made it across to MacOS X.
I believe there was a version of Simple Finder for OS X, though you needed a different user account for it (It was enabled via the Parental Controls, if I recall correctly)
This is awesome - this video has triggered some old memory in me... I swear I saw this technology at some point. I wonder if it was one of these, or some other funky machine. My IIGS has the touchscreen overlay which is pretty awesome
Awesome & wholesome! Btw, this has probably been suggested but still: would you ever consider installing Mac OS or Linux on an Amiga? Would something like that even be possible? As far as I know, old Macs, Amigas and Atari STs all had the same "wonderchip of the era", the Motorola 68000. 🤔
Back in the olden days, there was software that could run 68K Mac OS on an Amiga, and would use the Amiga's 68K natively. If you used one of the higher-tier Amigas, you could actually exceed the speed of the 68K Macs available at the time. Also, Debian Linux is available in 68K versions, and if you used either no desktop environment or the lightest available one (perhaps LXDE), you can run Linux on this ancient architecture. Also, you might be able to find BSD distributions available for 68K.
@@stgigamovement You could run Mac OS with that software but you'd have a harder time with Linux. Regular Linux requires an MMU and most of the Amigas don't have one.
@eDoc2020 OH on the topic of MMU and Classic Mac OS, it turns out that the popular PowerPC Classic Mac OS emulator SheepShaver for a very long time didn't support the MMU. The highest Mac OS Classic version that you could run on it was Mac OS 9.1. Some games like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets expect the final Mac OS 9 version of 9.2.2, and won't run on SheepShaver. Mind you, I haven't used SheepShaver in MANY years, but I still have my environment for it on one of my thumb drives, so if they added the MMU in the almost 10 years since I've used it, I could technically upgrade to 9.2.2. Also, SheepShaver does support the method in which Classic Mac OS on PowerPC will run 68K applications. That environment I have does actually contain some 68K software, such as a version of Monopoly made for the older black and white compact Macs. What's special about the version I have is that it actually implements several house rules people commonly add to Monopoly, such as the house rule in which Free Parking can give you money if you land there after some type of collection via something like Chance or Community Chest. Also, I had put Classilla on there, though it wasn't really usable for modern sites even in 2013. However, if your PowerPC Mac is able to run Mac OS X Tiger or better (better being Leopard or that elusive PowerPC beta of Snow Leopard), you can run InterWebPPC on it, which is a fork of relatively-modern Firefox tailored to run on PowerPC hardware, and it has different revisions for different types of PowerPC Macs. It has a G3 version, which is recommended also for use on Intel Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard's Rosetta 1 to browse the more modern web on. InterWebPPC also has two G4 versions, one for early G4 processors, and one for G4e processors that have AltiVec support (you'd often find this processor on later G4 machines like the Power Mac G4 MDD/Mirrored Drive Doors), and then you have the PowerPC G5 version, which, on something like a Power Mac G5 Cypher with its quad-core G5 and 16 gigabyte maximum of RAM and PCI-e slots, could actually play more intensive browser games. Now of course, if you're going to be browsing the modern web you probably will run into emoji at some point, and I'm not sure if InterWebPPC retains Firefox's Mozilla Twemoji. And that's nor even factoring in other Unicode characters standardized long after the heyday of these Macs. For such machines, I currently use the prototype of UnifontEX, my fork of GNU Unifont that focuses on high compatibility, which is currently a prototype until September 12th. Also, part of the compatibility stuff I did is to help it work on older Mac environments (so long as they support TrueType), so you could technically use it under Classic Mac OS.
![เจ็บที่ยังฮัก - ม่อน วรวิทย์ [ Official Mv ] จอนนี่มิวสิค](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KALIGSRSjFs/mqdefault.jpg)
Crazy how an OS designed mouse-with-only-one-button first would work well with a single-point touchscreen... 😅
what are the odds, eh ?
Well you got to remember Mac is made with only one mouse button in mind instead of two like Windows.
I have been using Mac OS X with a touchscreen for the past couple of years once I found a compatible one. I'm going to have to take the system out and turn it on cause I think there's a way to right click.
good to see ELO have found new hobbies after they disbanded in the 90s
Groose couldn't bring them down!
Hehe
Darn, you beat me to it! Great minds think alike, though, eh?!
I was hoping someone would make a joke like this
That was really out of the blue!
Imagine a world where all tech companies, and their customer support, just lingered on forever and you could just contact them when you need help with decades-old devices
to me, this is ideal in every situation, like parts and such, also drivers
Damn, I've never had luck e-mailing a company about old software. That's awesome.
EDIT: Actually that's a lie. I forgot about the time I e-mailed ART about the software for the EPP-1 EPROM programmer and they got back to me with DOS software, Windows 3.1 software, and a manual detailing the serial commands in case I wanted to use it on my own from terminal software.
Of course the Royal Canadian Air Farce would be in the Canadian Encyclopedia. 🤣🇨🇦
20 years later, still no more touch screen Macs.
That is not something I expected to see!
I'm also glad some companies still keep and provide old software for older hardware, and that within a day!
Seriously awesome stuff.
So wild that you and MichaelMJD both managed to get one of these and both happened to release your videos on it roughly the same time
Contrary to popular belief, touch screens have existed way before smartphones. I remember these kiosk computers in our local mall in the 90s here in Brazil that were touch screen. You could see the map of the mall, find stores you were looking for, events coming up if they had any... they were neat!
And lets not overlook the most prolific and ubiquitous CRT touch screen device that predates modern devices, but is still widely in use today: The ATM
Granted, most of these machines have since been retro-fitted or upgraded to LCD technology, but try to imagine life without them in the 90s and early 2000s.
Definitely existed way before smartphones, difference tech though.
The most common and cheap ones are resistive touchscreens, which requires you to press down the screen with actual force(stylus for accuracy). Another common one is infrared touch sensor that doesn't need an extra overlay over the display, common on bigger interactive screens like kiosks, can malfunction if there's dust accumulation on the side of the screen.
I've seen an Apple //e with a touch screen in 1986.
@@MitchMatrixxMost ATMs I've seen back in the day weren't touchscreen-based.
They definitely have. Remember the touchscreen in the first Die Hard movie?
Very cool technology! It is based on wave time reversal; in essence, every time you touch the screen you create waves that are sensed at the perimeter. Taps at different locations create different waves at the perimeter. Then the wave time reversal property is used to solve the inverse problem i.e., given the signal at the perimeter, where is the source/finger.
My PhD was on a similar topic!
The first time I used a touch screen was 1979 (to move a chess piece) and I believe it employed a similar technology. Was on a PLATO terminal in a computing lab at the University of Illinois, so there may have been patent concerns (would have cost money to license) as well as political (Jobs reportedly hated anything to do with the Newton) and artistic (Jobs again) in the decision for Apple not to do this. Still, a neat piece of kit and well presented.
How does the touch sensor detect finger swipes and releases? Do they generate vibrations? How do you distinguish between a touch and a release?
@@nyanpasu64that's what I'd like to know, as well! Both the video's and George's blurbs about the tech don't make this clear
Yes, it's elastic waves a.k.a. vibrations. The wave time reversal property is manifested if one records the scattered waves from an unknown source in a domain, reverse the obtained signal (flip it chronologically) and resend it, then the waves will backpropagate taking the exact same path (only in reverse) and refocus uniquely at the location of the unknown source. Take the example of a pond, where you throw a rock. Waves/ripples will emerge from the entry point and start propagating to the shore. If we could measure the wave height at some locations along shore throughout the process, flip the signal and regenerate the waves from these points, then the recreated signal would refocus/peak at the rock's entry point uniquely.
In the case of the screen, the backpropagation is not performed in practice. I believe the engineers have a library of signals from all possible tap points on the screen, and match it with the input you give at any given time. Still, the uniqueness of the match relies on the validity of wave time reversal.
Prof. Mathias Fink is the pioneer behind the technique that has found application in many fields, from medicine to geosciences and wireless communications. I recommend that you do a quick search for his lecture at HKUST; it's very interesting!
Lastly, engineers have used the same technique to develop screens with haptic feedback. In that case, the perimeter emits a wave (backpropagation is performed) and the signal refocuses under your finger.
MJD's video shows a diagram where the touch sensor is both emitting SAWs and receiving them, rather than listening for vibrations created by the finger's movement. So that's a thing I guess...
That was really cool of ELO to actually send the driver.
Kudos to ELO for responding back and providing with the drivers!!!
There was a burger king around where I lived that had those around the playground behind plastic facades. They very seldom worked though- most of the time I saw them they were turned off. Walmart also used to have the touch CRT monitors for their hiring kiosks as well.
I actually remember using one of these back in around 2003! It was at the Discovery Cove park in Florida being used as a kiosk to order photos/videos that had been taken of your group throughout the day. I remember being amazed/baffled by it - I was in primary (elementary) school at the time where iMac G3s were ubiquitous so it was amazing to me that these were touch screen whereas all the others I'd used up until that point weren't. Wasn't until years later that I remembered them, looked them up and found out that they were using the Elo system rather than being a complete product from Apple.
Hah awesome!
Wow Sean... what a touching video!
Your content is so much fun to watch, you're engaging and you find some WEIRD hardware to focus on! I'm glad MichaelMJD will be doing a video on that touchscreen tech, I've *never* heard of a touchscreen CRT even if it was fudged (in a very innovative way) into the iMac G3 chassis. I really love seeing these proto-versions of tech I use all the time. I was so excited for you to put this video out after watching the Patreon quick-look at this weird thing. But I'm always glad to see an upload from you. Have a great one man!
I remember LGR did a video on one made by IBM
Edit : found it
th-cam.com/video/QEZEVy6aIww/w-d-xo.html
Even hp had one
Well, you know as well as I do that there's only one thing left to do with this iMac... Upgrade it to a G4! (Along with upgrading the L2 cache to 1MB).
Yessssss
I got a copy of that Blockbuster guide as a prize for winning a computer contest back in 1998. That brought back some memories.
9:33 lol seeing this made me realize that my province didn't change it's name til 2001 lol We were Newfoundland but after that we became Newfoundland & Labrador (im from the Labrador part, the bit connected to Quebec physically). Man i wish we had touch on these back in the day, my uni had these Macs, they were fun when they arrived, its how i first saw the Star Wars Episode I trailer (Quicktime formatted trailer, and a projector later lol). Also 9:55 was a common sight on a friday night here in Canada in the 90s, the Royal Canadian Air Farce show on CBC, they used ot be radio-only with live recordings aired each weekend after 12 noon. 10:58 i had the Giant Sized X-Men #1 version of this disc (with the Incredible Hulk #181 first appearance of Wolverine comic as an added bonus), got it on clearance from my local Radio Shack in Goose Bay, and used it on the Windows 98 machine around 1997. I think the disc was able to do both Mac & Windows, something i had noticed on some demo discs from computer games magazines.
I saw a touch screen iMac G5 at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) in about 2013. Had the same USB cable drilled out the back so it could be plugged into the back.
You're welcome from a Canadian for the encyclopedia plus :)
Back when I was in grade 3 (2009) the school district in Kamloops BC actually used to have a bunch of G3's with debian and the old KDE desktop(they only ran the district on Linux), some of them had this touch screen support too! (And a dual boot with OS 9 at the time)
KDE 3.5!!!!!! Aaahhhhhhhh the memories!
Glad they were dual bootable. Even when I was little I hated Linux
@@kbhasi I spent AGES trying to figure out the exact OS, but luckily in 2009, there wasn't many distros
@@RealEpikCartfrenYT it was funny, one of the G3's (in orange) had HDD failure, but would netboot linux, and kick to another ramdisk OS (it just took WAY longer to boot)
I'm surprised that actually works so well. I personally thought of finding an old ELO monitor and using it as a graphics tablet for drawing stuff. I think i definitely SHOULD now get hold of a touchscreen monitor
I always have a weird nostalgia for ELO. In the original version of the MagiQuest attraction we used their touch screens nearly exclusively. The first location even had CRTs, though many of those got replaced with LCDs. The CRTs were not reliable at such long daily run cycles, and the burnin from our static patterns got really bad.
love that your channel’s content is performing well! this stuff is sick, keep it up :)
I have a couple of ELO LCD touch screens they are great and work just fine despite being a decade or so old. The acusticwave tracking was used by 3M when they made a touch screen projector in the early 2000’s. I was a repair engineer for them. It was under used and could have been so much more.
I have seen touchscreen projectors before and I think it's a really cool idea
Mom: we have an ipad at home
Ipad at home:
Touch screens have been around for a surprising length of time , it is just that the early ones were quite expensive and often not very useful as most software was just not compatible or not fully so.
Myst woud be a nice touch game to play
A Shaun and Steve collab! :)
Someone should make a port of doom to specifically take advantage of this thing. I know it's niche but if someone was willing to make a portrait mode version of doom for one monitor then I don't think this would be out of the question.
Fantastic video! That is really cool! Elo makes touchscreens for Target’s Point of Sales systems.
I remember when mesa was getting hardware acceleration support initially. Yes, it took years for that to get it to work really well.
1:05 Actually (yeah, I'm being THAT guy) California had touchscreen lottery machines in the 90s. No stylus required, just your finger.
i've got a touchscreen eMac that i purchased with no knowledge of the touchscreen mod. completely caught me off guard.
Well, the thumbnail didn't dissapoint; you really made an iMpad out of a vintage iMac G3
That is Fanatic Sean amazing Old Tech way ahead of its time
elo has been a major player in the touchscreen game for decades. Chances are that if you used any sort of touchscreen CRT, it was an elo product.
I'd heard of these iMacs but have never seen one before, super neat!
crt / glass touchscreens have always been responsive and smooth ... even back in the early 80's
It is pretty impressive how well that thing works.
I remember seeing a pallet of PS/2 touch-screen monitors, stil in their original boxes, at IBM Poughkeepsie (probably around 2009). I didn't know where they were headed, whether they were for some project or headed for scrap, but I was so tempted to grab one for myself.
But a Canadian Encyclopedia? You should have at least used Infopedia. (now that I think of it I should have picked up that copy I saw at VCF East and handed it to you). I had tried getting a boxed version from my old boss at Future Vision Multimedia (along with some of our other titles).
At my work we've got a couple of Elo 19" DVI touch screens - only 1280x1024 but still going strong.
So happy with touch screen DOTT, in on the edge of my seat for a letsplay touchscreen iMac fun stream!!!
I barely remember touch screens from before smartphones but I know these existed to me as well.
Pretty cool to see despite we are of course used to it already these days 😅
I used to work for a company that sold kiosks which used touchscreens. They were LCDs rather than CRTs, but they did have an old touchscreen CRT in the corner of the office that they used to use for prototyping the software. From memory the LCDs had a capacitive touchscreen, and there was a stylus (on a string so it wouldn't get stolen) that the user could use to sign their name on the screen. It was super primitive, like it didn't have palm rejection, so you couldn't rest your hand on the screen while writing. That made it difficult to use since the screen was at about a 30° angle in the kiosk.
We had to replace a few of the screens because they'd had the digitiser scratched up and it stopped working. Apparently in one instance there was an old lady with a huge diamond ring who was dragging it across the screen as she wrote with the stylus. That would be a LOT more dangerous with a CRT, since it could cause it to shatter and implode!
Scratching the front of a modern CRT isn't that dangerous. The glass is thicker than it needs to be and if the glass does crack the implosion protection systems work quite well. CRTs (or at least the types in 60s and 70s TVs) also have a separate piece of glass glued over the actual CRT, which will act as the screen protector on a smartphone.
I used to own some Elo touch panel kits for crts. one ended up in my HP M50 monitor about ten years ago.
8:35 SURE YOU DID, now we all know you didn't know it was a shrubbery!!!!!!
That X-Men comic thing. I would have melted as a kid in the early 2000s if I had that program. I used to be a huge X-Men kid :)
It's cool that ELO would keep such an old outdated and probably very unrequested driver on hand like that.
I think this must have been what Steve Jobs was talking about when he said they've done research and touchscreens don't work on computers
1:49 Funny enough, or maybe not in my case. My XJ is eating fuel pumps like they're going out of style
Pretty cool. I love the iMac G3, we had a lab full of them in 1999 in school. I have a Bondi Blue Rev A, a Blue Dalmatian (the rarest perhaps) , and a G3 Blueberry.
What an interesting take on classic Mac hardware, and thanks for today's touch-screen shenanigans!
This does remind me of my modern Dell Precision M3800 Hackintosh with a functioning touchscreen in OS X.
It works great in regards to responsiveness and general accuracy, and it's rather novel to control the OS with your finger... But the caveat here is that the interface both then and now, simply hasn't been designed with touch-driven use in mind.
The icons are too small and improperly spaced for a smooth experience.
Eventually, developers would figure out creative solutions to this issue with the advent and proliferation of the touch smartphone; but I believe that so far, only Windows and Linux have responsive versions of their OS that adapt the UI for touch-driven use.
Apple, being the stubborn stalwart that they are have yet to catch up in this area.... though I suspect there's a few builds of touchscreen macOS being test driven across the Apple campus 🤔
The folks over at Blockbuster in Bend, OR might find this amusing! Nice one, as usual.
I'm sure there has to be touch screen drivers for doom and w3d that can be ported over from an iPad. Might have to modify, I'm guessing. Also as far as the plastics, I'm surprised no one has tried to 3d print at least the smaller parts. The specs have to be online somewhere, I'm thinking... great video as always...
I've been waiting 3 years for this video but I didn't even know it. I picked up two of these in New Hampshire off of Craigslist during peak Covid (one working, one non-working). Same exact model and color. I shamefully caused more damage trying to take apart the broken one thinking I could move the components to a working donor iMac, and learning how hard it is to disassemble an iMac in the process. I even mentioned having a spare one and offering it to Steve at VCF East but then I didn't (yet) reach out. Please reach out if you want another donor parts machine.
i perked up when i heard VCF midwest. First one i have been to and looking forward to it all month now
Dear goodness... this myth exists. I knew where was touch screen monitors this age, but I wonder just what it took to graft the sensors within the iMac's CRT bezel.
I remember disassembling an iMac in my youth, somehow I sliced my finger pulling apart the metal assembly and I still have the scar to this day
This would be great at a show with a 'Do Not Touch' sign on it, just gotta cross out the 'Do Not' part!
As soon as I heard it banging and beeping, I was like, "This is an ELO."
I have one tied to my old dell GX260, a cast off from a factory. Damn good monitor but I never use the touch portion.
Comic Books were the touchscreens of their day! 😁
Those buttons on that x-men comic book are looking kinda sus.
The Callahan Auto Parts t-shirt is throwing me off. I thought this was a tech channel. I better see that Jeep’s fuel pump being repaired soon. 😂
my opticians of all places still use flat-panel Elo TouchSystems from the early 2000s… clearly they’re bulletproof
When did Jeff Lynne get into touch screen Electronics? 😆
My shoulders are sobbing just watching you use that thing in a 15 minute video! I couldn't imagine actually sitting at a desk with something like that. Standing at a kiosk where the monitor was mounted at an ergonomic angle and distance would be another thing, but a regular workstation? Ugh.
There is a simple tool called "virtual cd" on macintosh garden. It can mount ISO and Toast images. Maybe even more RAW-type CD-images.
Elo... Touchscreen or 70's rock group 😮
Very interesting. It makes me wonder why Apple didn’t create products with touchscreens until the iPad (apple newton, notwithstanding). There was a company that sold a touchscreen kit for MacBooks to make them touchscreen capable (you may have done a video on those already- my memory isn’t so great), but they were very invasive to install. This seems to qualify as ‘magical’ to me. 😅
Probably for the same reason they still don't offer touchscreens or even Wacom Penabled screens on Macs: They didn't think touch input made sense for a desktop experience. I remember the keynote where Steve Jobs himself pooh-poohed the idea of reaching over the keyboard to poke at your screen.
@@stevethepocket Which, to be fair, is a good point. That's why it wasn't until screens got big (Both in size and resolutions) enough to hold a keyboard that touch screens became main stream.
@@Toonrick12so the Palm Pilots?
@@hicknopunk I said touchscreens, not poke with a stick screens.
@@Toonrick12 lol
Modded iMac G3 with a Touchscreen. Pimp my Mac…
I would expect the Canadian Encyclopedia to be very short. It only has two topics: hockey and maple syrup.
I got one free 20 years ago, touchscreen and all. Dragged it behind a hearse. 20 years later I now regret it!
I was just thinking of McClane encountering a touchscreen crt in Die Hard… “cute toy”
Michael MJD just released the same video essentially!
What’s nuts is I have had an iMac DV with the Elo touch module for the last 20 years with original drivers. I should compare the driver versions uploaded to Macintosh Garden and if it’s different, upload it. Also, there are no OS X drivers for it.
The condition of my Elo iMac is excellent as well.
That scrolling looked like it was on my phone
In nakatomi plaza there were touchscreen computers back in the end of the 80s
I bet Myst would be a perfect match for this system
Michaelmjd is one of my favorite youtubers
i used to work on a lot of itouch devices back in high school for people with disabilities
Gotta give props to ELO, it's getting shitty out here to find drivers for old stuff, many times you're getting lucky to find a file name on the web archive, and then find it on an obscure FTP somewhere and then you have to use an older browser to download it. Sony, HP/Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, and so on have purged all their old support documents from the public facing internet, although humourously enough HP still has a public FTP with all the softpaqs on it just not a good means to locate which softpaqs you need similar story with Microsoft's Knowledgebase and the Update Catalog still having mostly everything in it back to Windows 2000, Compaq stuff from the late 90s I can still find file names in the webarchive, but the type of scripting and super long URL structure HP used in the early 2000s archived very poorly. I don't know if it's still the case but a decade ago when I needed Windows NT 3.x and NT4 updates I found the links in the webarchive and they were still active on Microsoft's servers just the download pages were gone.
I vaguely remember reading an article about this when it was first released. It was round about the same time that Apple started putting CD burners in the iMac and launched their Rip Mix Burn advertising campaign. I also remember reading that there were plans for one of the UK high street stores (WH Smith think) who were going to have self serve kiosks with these things for burning custom music CDs. There was also going to be a printer attached for the album artwork. I don't think it ever happened though.
By the way, you should try this using MacOS 9's 'Simple Finder' feature. One of those really useful OS9 things that never made it across to MacOS X.
I believe there was a version of Simple Finder for OS X, though you needed a different user account for it (It was enabled via the Parental Controls, if I recall correctly)
I love this channel!
This is awesome - this video has triggered some old memory in me... I swear I saw this technology at some point. I wonder if it was one of these, or some other funky machine. My IIGS has the touchscreen overlay which is pretty awesome
I don't know what exactly I was expecting when I clocked on this video, but Royal Canadian Air Farce wasn't it.
Before you say anything I’m assuming it’s in pieces because of shipping. I’ve had 3 of them show up in crumbles over the years
Elo is a great company.
My bad, I was checking the specs on the end line for the rotary girder
Awesome & wholesome!
Btw, this has probably been suggested but still: would you ever consider installing Mac OS or Linux on an Amiga? Would something like that even be possible? As far as I know, old Macs, Amigas and Atari STs all had the same "wonderchip of the era", the Motorola 68000. 🤔
Back in the olden days, there was software that could run 68K Mac OS on an Amiga, and would use the Amiga's 68K natively. If you used one of the higher-tier Amigas, you could actually exceed the speed of the 68K Macs available at the time. Also, Debian Linux is available in 68K versions, and if you used either no desktop environment or the lightest available one (perhaps LXDE), you can run Linux on this ancient architecture. Also, you might be able to find BSD distributions available for 68K.
@@stgigamovement You could run Mac OS with that software but you'd have a harder time with Linux. Regular Linux requires an MMU and most of the Amigas don't have one.
@eDoc2020 OH on the topic of MMU and Classic Mac OS, it turns out that the popular PowerPC Classic Mac OS emulator SheepShaver for a very long time didn't support the MMU. The highest Mac OS Classic version that you could run on it was Mac OS 9.1. Some games like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets expect the final Mac OS 9 version of 9.2.2, and won't run on SheepShaver. Mind you, I haven't used SheepShaver in MANY years, but I still have my environment for it on one of my thumb drives, so if they added the MMU in the almost 10 years since I've used it, I could technically upgrade to 9.2.2. Also, SheepShaver does support the method in which Classic Mac OS on PowerPC will run 68K applications. That environment I have does actually contain some 68K software, such as a version of Monopoly made for the older black and white compact Macs. What's special about the version I have is that it actually implements several house rules people commonly add to Monopoly, such as the house rule in which Free Parking can give you money if you land there after some type of collection via something like Chance or Community Chest. Also, I had put Classilla on there, though it wasn't really usable for modern sites even in 2013. However, if your PowerPC Mac is able to run Mac OS X Tiger or better (better being Leopard or that elusive PowerPC beta of Snow Leopard), you can run InterWebPPC on it, which is a fork of relatively-modern Firefox tailored to run on PowerPC hardware, and it has different revisions for different types of PowerPC Macs. It has a G3 version, which is recommended also for use on Intel Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard's Rosetta 1 to browse the more modern web on. InterWebPPC also has two G4 versions, one for early G4 processors, and one for G4e processors that have AltiVec support (you'd often find this processor on later G4 machines like the Power Mac G4 MDD/Mirrored Drive Doors), and then you have the PowerPC G5 version, which, on something like a Power Mac G5 Cypher with its quad-core G5 and 16 gigabyte maximum of RAM and PCI-e slots, could actually play more intensive browser games. Now of course, if you're going to be browsing the modern web you probably will run into emoji at some point, and I'm not sure if InterWebPPC retains Firefox's Mozilla Twemoji. And that's nor even factoring in other Unicode characters standardized long after the heyday of these Macs. For such machines, I currently use the prototype of UnifontEX, my fork of GNU Unifont that focuses on high compatibility, which is currently a prototype until September 12th. Also, part of the compatibility stuff I did is to help it work on older Mac environments (so long as they support TrueType), so you could technically use it under Classic Mac OS.
I have a tft elo touchscreen that i use on my win98 PC. Never occurred to me that it might be mac compatible. Need to try that software
The secret is a tiny little man inside the flyback transformer watching your hands.
I would love to have one of these and put it on like a Kiosk display next to my self made PS2 demo Station
I'm pretty sure that the Canadian Encyclopedia is just a regular encyclopedia narrated by Bob and Doug McKenzie.
My wife has been using "touch on tube" technology for a LONG TIME.
It beats me why Apple never used this simple technology on any of their desktop or MacBook products.
Honestly I would like some device that do this on any monitor. There was some projects, but this seems like way better than even today stuff.
My 1st primary school somehow managed to get a touch screen CRT back in either 1999 or 2000. It didn't work anywhere near as well as this!
"Still better than apple maps" Bro that's insaneeee
now the question is, does the touch screen still work in OSX?