I stumbled onto an article about touch screen technology through Twitter via Atmel. They gave a tiny little piece of history on touch screens and have a great infographic on it. I took one of the names and started searching and found cool little nuggets of useless but fun information on the subject and wanted to compile it here. Most of it is just regurgitating Wikipedia, but it's still nice to have it all written up concisely and not so encyclopedically-sounding. If you'd rather read all this unfiltered, it's at Wikipedia here (about touch screens in general) and here (about multi-touch). I've just reorganized and distilled it all. Accuracy is not guaranteed and was not at all verified. If I were to write a book about it, I'd go double-check all this stuff. This is a blog. It's not worth the pixels it's printed on. As stated in the Atmel article, touch screens are EVERYWHERE now. So much so that children think screens that do not respond to touch are simply broken. A monitor without touch is, well, quaint. Remember that scene from the movie "Star Trek 4: The Voyage" where Scotty talks into the MacIntosh mouse? "The keyboard... How quaint."