With all of the recent excitement of multi-touch displays and the race to develop interfaces and applications, as well as devices (think Apple iPhone), for the technology, Bill Buxton, Microsoft researcher, manages to put the last 25 years of (multi)-touch technology in perpective.

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, the original work undertaken by my team was done in 1984, the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, there was a significant body of prior art on which multi-touch was built.

Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved