Actually there were not capacitive touch screens back then. . . You keep telling me stuff, and when I check, you turn out to be wrong. I don't think you are purposely misleading me, but you really ought to check your statements before you make them.
The prototype x-y mutual capacitance touchscreen (left) developed at CERN in 1977 by Bent Stumpe, a Danish electronics engineer, for the control room of CERN’s accelerator SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron). This was a further development of the self-capacitance screen (right), also developed by Stumpe at CERN in 1972.
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These are again FACTS, and you can do all the dancing about membranes, LED/photodiode grids and light pens, and Indium Tin oxide crap you want, none of them worked as a transparent multi-touch screen until Apple's engineers cracked the secret of how to do it and showed the world how and were awarded the patent on how.
Now that statement is very funny in light of the fact that you are demonstrably wrong. Your "FACTS" don't seem to actually be facts, or are you going to claim that one of Apple's Engineers was Bent Stumpe from Denmark back in 1972? :)
I wonder if he is collecting royalties from Apple, etc?
You keep telling me stuff, and when I check, you turn out to be wrong. I don't think you are purposely misleading me, but you really ought to check your statements before you make them.
Diogenes, I know one hell of a lot about this than do you. . . and it is obvious. What I wrote is that Apple owns the patents on mulli-touch capacitance transparent screens, specifically on mobile platforms, not "touchscreens," not what you looked up. Look at the photograph you posted. Is either of those a transparent or a multitouch screen? Not by a long shot.
They are NOT. QED. They are single touch, capacitance screens which are not transparent and not even display screens. They were simple grids. I specified what Apple holds the patent on to do accurately it on mobile devices and with low voltages consistently at high speed. These were intractable problems. Apple holds the patents on all the multi-touch screens on mobile devices as I told you and makes quite a bit of money on the royalties from other makers from those patents. THESE are facts. Your looking up "facts" from a publicly editable Wikipedia proves nothing. . . where someone with an agenda can change what is written there weekly if they want and add that Apple is lying about it. Apple has no reason to lie about any of that. . . because it would be easily shown in a court of law, and has not.
You are so desperate to show Apple and I lying about something, that you grasp at straws. . . that is funny. I am not going to do your research for you. I am certain of my position on this. . . This has been proved multiple times in court and in challenges to the US Patent Office, and in challenges to the Federal Trade Commission.
Try looking up those patents at the US Patent office instead of Wikipedia. Stumpe's work is listed as prior art in Apple's patents among a huge list of predecessor work required to be listed leading up to their invention.