Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware where we're taking a look at hardware
and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete! And today it is the IBM 8516
CRT touchscreen from the beginning of the 1990s. And yeah you can touch and
draw and do all kinds of things that you would normally do with a mouse or light
pen or whatever else -- just with your fingers! And so let's see what this thing
is and what it can do.
All right so this is the IBM PS/2 Model 8516 13-inch CRT
touchscreen monitor first introduced in June of 1991 for a suggested retail
price of $1695 US dollars, holy crap. That would be
almost $3,100 at the time of this recording, not a cheap price for a
13-inch VGA monitor back then. It was built by IBM to be compatible with PCs
running DOS, Windows 3 -- and IBM OS/2 of course, because they were still pushing
it rather hard when this came out. And as advanced and awesome as it was for its
time it was not the first of its kind as far as touchscreen CRTs, not by a
long shot. For instance Hewlett-Packard had their
HP-150 computer with a touchscreen CRT back in 1983 and there were plenty of
third party alternative monitors that had touchscreens for PCs in 1991, so yeah. It
wasn't brand new tech or anything, in fact it wasn't even IBM's first
touchscreen CRT. They had their IBM InfoWindow display back in 1986. And yeah that
bridged between an IBM AT and Laserdisc players, I would love to find one of
those monitors. But anyway back to the 8516 and unlike today's multi-touch
capacitive touchscreens these were single touch resistive touch screens.
Which means in order to use them you must apply pressure in a single spot to
get anything to react. Now, early versions of capacitive multi-touch screens
existed at the time but they saw very little use. Pretty much what you saw were
these resistive screens, most notably on ATMs and other kind of systems like that.
And there were several different methods used at the time to enable resistive
touch, often relying on a grid or an overlay, underneath or on top of the
glass. But not the 8516, this one used pressure transducers to determine the X
and Y coordinates being touched. And it didn't just stop there, it also measured
the Z-axis to respond to multiple degrees of pressure on any software that
allowed it. Now this screen in particular was a relatively popular option
throughout the 90s, in fact you might have even used one yourself! It was used
in educational, business, and public spaces for years. Some specific examples
that I could find were student information kiosks used in schools such
as Hofstra University in 1992, and workplace training and information
systems such as EASY or the "Employee Access System for You," and the Smart
Traveler transit information kiosks deployed by Caltrans all over the state
of California in 1994. Yep every single one of these used the IBM 8516. And it
was also used -- get this -- for the Summer Olympics in 1992 in Barcelona! It was
used for the media information systems for TV and radio commentators
where IBM provided 3,600 PS/2s all over the events fitted with the 8516 touch
screens. And I mean that's just scratching the surface, who knows where
else these screens were used. I can find records of these things being repurposed
for all sorts of uses over the years from ticket dispensing machines to kids
playthings and whatever as they just got cheaper over the years. In fact there was
a cheaper alternative introduced pretty much from the beginning from IBM and
that was the Touch Select announced in early 1992 for $670, about a grand less
than the main monitor. And this was actually a panel that attached to a
number of compatible IBM monitors such as the PS/2 Model 8513. And yeah I'm just
rather fond of these PS/2 monitors whether it's a touchscreen or not. It's
just classic no-frills IBM and this one's even more no-frills than others. It
doesn't even have a swivel base underneath, just big thick slabs of
non-adjustable thick grey plastic to hold it up. And in addition to the
expected VGA cable you also have a PS/2 mouse cable, and this is indeed
what the monitor uses in order to make the touchscreen happen. So that plugs
into your computer and then underneath the monitor is passthrough for PS/2 as
well. And this is to connect your regular mouse so yes, you can use touchscreen and
mouse functions simultaneously. But yeah I mean that's pretty much it for the
monitor, it's just a monitor. We're just gonna need to find some drivers,
install it, and yeah let's go ahead and do that because I am psyched to touch my
screen in all the right ways. So for some period-appropriateness I'm gonna be
using this IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486. And I've got it all plugged in here and
everything is compatible because it is a PS/2 after all. So yeah let's just power
this on and power the computer and see what we get!
And of course drivers are gonna be the first thing, which I hope I have the
right ones. So yeah if you saw me get this computer, uh wow, a little while ago
actually now here on LGR... I had a ton of disks and I thought for sure that this
8516 would have a driver disk in there somewhere, but nope. For the life of me I
can't find one if it is, so I just downloaded one online and hopefully it
is the correct set of drivers. It's the only one that I could find. Dang it. This
table gets more wobbly every time I really got to get a new table this year.
All right.
*mumbling and typing*
Sweet. "IBM touch device installation version 1.0!" It's failed,
what the -- you didn't ask me to do anything different! What. All right I'll
try putting it on a disk I don't know what it wants. All right that worked, "touch
device is capable of operating in two ways: touch pointing mode, touch only, no
mouse emulation, or mouse emulation mode, either touch or mouse. I've got a PS/2
mouse so we'll try option two.
Whaaaat.
Well why did it do that? Apparently the self extracting executable does not extract
it in the correct way on the... well that's dumb. Yeah see, files are supposed
to be going in separate directories, why didn't it do that in DOS? These folders
weren't there at all. Well we'll just rewrite the disk. Okay yeah let's try
that again. All right installation was sweet. "Allows
you to configure the IBM touch device," that would be this one. Looks like you can
do this and the TouchSelect which is pretty cool. That was easy.
Well let's see if it did indeed update things. Sweet! So IBM touch device driver
version 1.01 is on there. Ooh "downloading microcode," that's a
message you don't see anymore. "This program allows you to calibrate the IBM
touch device, press the center of the target firmly and accurately," ah whoa
this is rad. If it was just this I'd already be happy.
Oh man that's sweet. Yes save. Augh! Well that's just that's just amazing. Huh okay
let's see if I can like, if it's in mouse mode. Okay so yeah, I can control the
mouse cursor. I mean it's not necessarily a mouse cursor, necessarily, it's
obviously just kind of this thing, but yeah. Let's see what's in this
demo folder. Ya got a draw and phone, hmm curious what phone is. Uh-huh, all right
dial that. Yeah I don't know what the point of that is. And the other one I
think was draw, let's try this out. I'm assuming this is just gonna be a drawing
program. Yeah yes it is, yeah, there we go. Some brush tips. I apparently hit exit? I
didn't tap that. Yeah that's not the color I chose, but so, it's definitely
pressure-sensitive like when I just barely pressed that "yes" it selected it
and then if I press it down it clears it. Actually I mean, that's pretty cool so
that's a demonstration of the pressure the Z-axis there. So
I mean that's pretty sweet why not? Now it's just a little... it's a little bit, I
don't know what's with that, all I wanted to do is draw a straight line! That kind
of worked. I guess if you do it too slow it's like freaking out. All right let's
just exit out of there, that's cool I like that. Now I wonder if it'll run in
Windows because I think there's a separate installation or something for
Windows but we'll see here in a moment. Whoa nope holy crap, it's doing stuff
I don't know, if that's correct because it kind of just seems like it's in... yeah
it's in mouse emulation mode. Mouse just stopped working what that
what the dick
hmm apparently it's just, nothing is working
not even the regular mouse. Oh it just... just crapped itself, yeah, I have no clue
what's going on. No mouse device of any kind is working at the moment, so it's
time to go troubleshoot and I'll be back! Hopefully. All right so I just cleared
out everything and reinstalled and it seems to be working again or at least it
loaded the driver and whatnot, so uh. And now the mouse just crapped itself
again, it just totally totally stopped working.
Something is not right that's for sure. I think it's working again that's the
mouse click sound. So we're gonna try SimCity here because I don't know what
else to do.
Well I mean that that kind of works. *mumbles numbers* Yay, copy protection.
Well that is, uh it's not very fun to move the mouse this way
in fact it's terrible. Continue, okay, I gotta try out some other mode cuz this
is not gonna work. So there is this utility here that lets you do things
it's like some diagnostics or whatever. So there's an emulation type of the
mouse here to choose between relative, glass mouse, or absolute. We have absolute
chosen hopefully that's a little better than relative. So this is absolute mode
this makes a little bit more sense. So instead of like, having to move it around
relatively, you could just tap like that. And well it's... well anyway. Okay! So this is
kind of cool, like seriously I like that. When it's like, you know large things
that you can actually tap this makes a whole lot of sense. Now obviously it's
not necessarily ideal cuz this game is not made for it, but it does work. Really
as far as the resolution for the types of touches that it can recognize it's
pretty high relative to others of the time period, but little things like that
are just not like ideal. The fact that it kind of does work is pretty friggin
sweet. So this is glass mouse mode, it's like relative mode but just way
more sensitive. I still don't know why Windows isn't working, it should be. I've
installed the Windows things it's in, you know, mouse emulation mode here. It's
working for DOS programs but I mean, it says Windows support's installed. I don't
know man, just don't know. I guess it's not meant to be. Well see now I'm just
really curious, and I've got to try Duke Nukem 3D. Which
this is not a very fast computer so it's probably gonna run like garbage, but it's
worth it for science! All right it's time to try the 8516, let's rock! And hope
that it works, does it work? Oh okay here we go, I got it, I can do this
hey oh my goodness I think the sensitivity is a little
little high, put it all the way down and see what happens. Okay that's a little
absurd but it works. So I have mouse as moving right now and I'm just shooting
with the keyboard. Which in hindsight maybe I should have done "click" to do it
but whatever I didn't. So every time it's beeping I'm actually "clicking" the mouse.
Here we go, oh, this is exhausting, ah, my arm is hurting so much! Okay jump jump
There we go, alright I got this! I'm Duke Nukem! And open that door
no there's a guy behind me! It's really hard to turn around. Ran out of ammo dang it!
No can't let this happen! I'm better than this! Oh I guess I'm not. Blame it on the
touchscreen. Well that's it for this episode of LGR Oddware, and I hope that
you enjoyed it! I certainly think this is a pretty neat little monitor when it
works. And yeah that's just unfortunate that I wasn't able to get it working
with Windows 3 even though I've seen it working with it, I know that it does. And
I mean, it's meant to do that but for whatever reason my configuration is just
not working, whether it be the monitor having issues or the computer itself or
the software, who knows what. It's just not meant to be today. But I will be
revisiting touchscreen CRT solutions again in the future so I'm sure that
won't be the only chance that we get to look at Windows 3
with a touchy-feely CRT. So if you would like to see some of those than I
recommend sticking around. There are new videos every Monday and Friday here on
LGR, on all sorts of topics not just Oddware, of course. It's software and games
and whatever else I happen to want to cover whenever I want to cover it! It's
just kind of what I do. And as always thank you very much for watching.