This post that I dug up blows my mind - didn't even know curved touch screens were even a thing back then. To give us a reference point, Samsung's first curved display was from 2014!

Interactive touch screens are now ubiquitous. They are found in our homes, offices and pockets. They are designed to control our lights, appliances and entertainment systems. We use them to access information and communicate with others. They have become an essential part of our lives. But it wasn't always this way. In 2007, the year the first iPhone was released, interactive touch screen designs were not as common as they are today.

So what was it like to design touch screens back then? We dug up a couple of our blog posts from 2007 to give you a little taste on touch screen prototyping:

1. Z-Depth Touch Screen
2. Curved Touch Screen
3. Touch Screen + LED
4. Touch Screen Instruments
5. Touch Screen V5

7/17/2007 Curved Touch Screen // Ron

Ah, the joys of having a band saw that works, and lots of scrap wood!!!
It didn’t take me more than about 30mins to find a couple sacrificial scraps, mark out a radius, cut them on my band saw and find enough clamps to hold everything together long enough to see if it works…

I had to mount the LED array on the end with silver tape to guide the light into the edge and figure out a way to clamp the end of the plexi straight enough so that the array fit…etc.. but this is what the camera saw!

so, in short, it works like a charm… the only thing that was surprising was that as the screen starts to curve, it has to be very clean or those smudges really show.. (note the very bright smudge patterns at the bottom of the image..)

Hope you enjoyed the a sneak-peak into how interactive curved touch screens were prototyped in 2007! Check out another one of our curvy interactive designs!