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HISTORY Cirque's road to GlidePoint commercialization was rocky but ultimately successful. Dr. Gerpheide invented GlidePoint on a shoestring budget in the basement of his house in Salt Lake City , Utah . He and Mr. O'Callaghan travelled for many years attempting unsuccessfully to convince notebook computer makers to agree to use GlidePoint. Dr. Gerpheide recalls "We would often drive to the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas and stay in a seedy hotel. There wasn't money for a booth at the show, so we carried our GlidePoint prototypes around the convention center making demonstrations to whomever was willing to watch. The early prototypes had a suitcase full of electronic circuits. I knew they could be shrunk into an integrated circuit, but we didn't have money for that either. So we were seeking a large leap of faith for a manufacturer to agree to use the technology. It was even worse because at that time most notebook computers were running DOS, which did not need a pointing device!" Finally, Cirque was able to convince a computer manufacturer, shrink the circuitry into an integrated circuit, and begin selling a retail GlidePoint touchpad in April 1994 . The first notebook computer containing GlidePoint appeared soon thereafter. GlidePoint technology was licensed to ALPS Electric Company LTD, and ALPS launched touchpad products into the market. In 2003 , Cirque was acquired by ALPS as an independent research, development, sales and distribution facility. TECHNOLOGY GlidePoint was the first touchpad technology to be adopted in Notebook Computer s as a system Pointing Device , that is, performing the same function as a Mouse . Before that, system pointing was performed mostly using a small Trackball embedded in the notebook computer case, and sometimes by other mechanical devices. After GlidePoint's commercial introduction in April 1994, its popularity in notebook computers steadily increased and Synaptics and Logitech also introduced Capacitive Touchpad technologies. Presently, in 2005, both GlidePoint and Synaptics touchpads are used widely, with approximately 90% of notebook computers using touchpads. Although GlidePoint was the first touchpad successful as a system pointing device, it was not the first touch input technology. For example, it was pre-dated by Resistive Membrane input pads such as used in the Model 3155 Keyboard from Keytronic, Inc. Transparent resistive membrane technology is presently used in PDAs such as the Palm Pilot , Point-of-sale Terminal s, Video Poker Machine s, and information Kiosk s and other touch screens. There are also prior capacitive touch input pads in the patent literature. One, "The UnMouse" was invented by James Logan and marketed by his company Microtouch Systems , Inc. as a retail plug-in mouse alternative product in the 1980's, but discontinued after a few years. GlidePoint technology senses the presence and absolute position of a finger on the pad's surface using capacitive techniques. Because of the capacitive technique, it does not require electrical contact with the finger, nor does it require the finger to exert pressure on the pad. It measures very small capacitance changes, due to a finger's proximity, among electrodes in a grid buried beneath the insulating surface of the pad. From these measurements, it can determine if a finger is touching the pad, and if so, the finger's absolute position horizontally and vertically on the surface. Subtraction of a preceding absolute position from the present absolute position yields the relative motion of the finger during that time. This relative motion is the same as a mouse for controlling position of a computer screen cursor. ADWARDS
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