HP-150

The 150 (code named "Magic") was introduced with great hoopla in October, 1983. It was HP's first MS-DOS PC, equiped with an Intel 8088 CPU. The market was already crowded with MS-DOS PCs, and vendors tried to differentiate their products with unique hardware features. In an attempt to make its offering easier to use, HP built in a touch screen feature to the 150. This allowed users to use screen-touching to replace many commands that would otherwise require the keyboard. The touchscreen feature consisted of a series of vertical and horzontal infrared light beams that crossed just in front of the screen. One of these vertical and horzontal beams was broken when a finger touched the screen, positioning the cursor at the desired location (or activating a soft function key).