IBM 8516 Touchscreen CRT Monitor

Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware where were taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete! And today it is the IBM 8516 CRT touchscreen from the beginning of the 1990s. And yeah you can touch and draw and do all kinds of things that you would normally do with a mouse or light pen or whatever else -- just with your fingers! And so let’s see what this thing is and what it can do.

All right so this is the IBM PS/2 Model 8516 13-inch CRT touchscreen monitor first introduced in June of 1991 for a suggested retail price of $1695 US dollars, holy crap. That would be almost $3,100 at the time of this recording, not a cheap price for a 13-inch VGA monitor back then. 

It was built by IBM to be compatible with PCs running DOS, Windows 3 -- and IBM OS/2 of course, because they were still pushing it rather hard when this came out. And as advanced and awesome as it was for its time it was not the first of its kind as far as touchscreen CRTs, not by a long shot. 

For instance Hewlett-Packard had their HP-150 computer with a touchscreen CRT back in 1983 and there were plenty of third party alternative monitors that had touchscreens for PCs in 1991, so yeah. It wasn’t brand new tech or anything, in fact it wasn’t even IBMs first touchscreen CRT. They had their IBM Info Window display returned in 1986.. And yeah that bridged between an IBM AT and Laserdisc players, I would love to find one of those monitors. 

But anyway back to the 8516 and unlike todays multi-touch capacitive touchscreens these were single touch resistive touch screens. Which means in order to use them you must apply pressure in a single spot to get anything to react. Now, early versions of capacitive multi-touch screens existed at the time but they saw very little use. Pretty much what you saw were these resistive screens, most notably on ATMs and other kind of systems like that.

And there were several different methods used at the time to enable resistive touch, often relying on a grid or an overlay, underneath or on top of the glass. But not the 8516, this one used pressure transducers to determine the X and Y coordinates being touched. And it didn’t just stop there, it also measured the Z-axis to respond to multiple degrees of pressure on any software that allowed it. Now this screen in particular was a relatively popular option throughout the 90s, in fact you might have even used one yourself! 

It was used in educational, business, and public spaces for years. Some specific examples that I could find were student information kiosks used in schools such as Hofstra University in 1992, and workplace training and information systems such as EASY or the Employee Access System for You, and the Smart Traveler transit information kiosks deployed by Caltrans all over the state of California in 1994. 

Yep every single one of these used the IBM 8516. And it was also used -- get this -- for the Summer Olympics in 1992 in Barcelona! It was used for the media information systems for TV and radio commentators where IBM provided 3,600 PS/2s all over the events fitted with the 8516 touch screens. And I mean that’s just scratching the surface, who knows where else these screens were used. I can find records of these things being repurposed for all sorts of uses over the years from ticket dispensing machines to kids playthings and whatever as they just got cheaper over the years. 

In fact there was a cheaper alternative introduced pretty much from the beginning from IBM and that was the Touch Select announced in early 1992 for $670, about a grand less than the main monitor. And this was actually a panel that attached to a number of compatible IBM monitors such as the PS/2 Model 8513. And yeah I’m just rather fond of these PS/2 monitors whether it’s a touchscreen or not. 

It’s just classic no-frills IBM and this one’s even more no-frills than others. It doesn’t even have a swivel base underneath, just big thick slabs of non-adjustable thick grey plastic to hold it up. And in addition to the expected VGA cable you also have a PS/2 mouse cable, and this is indeed what the monitor uses in order to make the touchscreen happen. So that plugs into your computer and then underneath the monitor is pass through for PS/2 as well. 

And this is to connect your regular mouse so yes, you can use touchscreen and mouse functions simultaneously. But yeah I mean that’s pretty much it for the monitor, it’s just a monitor. Were just gonna need to find some drivers, install it, and yeah lets go ahead and do that because I am psyched to touch my screen in all the right ways. So for some period-appropriateness I’m gonna be using this IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486. And I’ve got it all plugged in here and everything is compatible because it is a PS/2 after all. So yeah let’s just power this on and power the computer and see what we get!

And of course drivers are gonna be the first thing, which I hope I have the right ones. So yeah if you saw me get this computer, uh wow, a little while ago actually now here on LGR... I had a ton of disks and I thought for sure that this 8516 would have a driver disk in there somewhere, but nope. For the life of me I can’t find one if it is, so I just downloaded one online and hopefully it is the correct set of drivers. It’s the only one that I could find. Dang it. This table gets more wobbly every time I really got to get a new table this year.

All right. Sweet. IBM touch device installation version 1.0! Its failed, what the -- you didn’t ask me to do anything different! What. All right I’ll try putting it on a disk I don’t know what it wants. All right that worked, touch device is capable of operating in two ways: touch pointing mode, touch only, no mouse emulation, or mouse emulation mode, either touch or mouse. I’ve got a PS/2 mouse so well try option two. Well why did it do that? 

Apparently the self-extracting executable does not extract it in the correct way on the... well that’s dumb. Yeah see, files are supposed to be going in separate directories, why didn’t it do that in DOS? These folders weren’t there at all. Well just rewrite the disk. Okay yeah let’s try that again. All right installation was sweet. Allows you to configure the IBM touch device, that would be this one. Looks like you can do this and the Touch Select which is pretty cool. That was easy.

Well let’s see if it did indeed update things. Sweet! So IBM touch device driver version 1.01 is on there. Ooh downloading microcode, that’s an message you don’t see anymore. This program allows you to calibrate the IBM touch device, press the center of the target firmly and accurately, ah whoa this is rad. If it was just this Id already is happy. Oh man that’s sweet. Yes save. Aught! Well that’s just that’s just amazing. Huh okay let’s see if I can like, if it’s in mouse mode. 

Okay so yeah, I can control the mouse cursor. I mean it’s not necessarily a mouse cursor, necessarily, it’s obviously just kind of this thing, but yeah. Let’s see what’s in this demo folder. Ya got a draw and phone, hmm curious what phone is. Uh-huh, all right dial that. Yeah I don’t know what the point of that is. And the other one I think was draw, let’s try this out. I’m assuming this is just gonna be a drawing program. Yeah yes it is, yeah, there we go. Some brush tips. 

I apparently hit exit? I didn’t tap that. Yeah that’s not the color I chose, but so, it’s definitely pressure-sensitive like when I just barely pressed that yes it selected it and then if I press it down it clears it. Actually I mean, that’s pretty cool so that’s a demonstration of the pressure the Z-axis there. So I mean that’s pretty sweet why not? Now it’s just a little... it’s a little bit, I don’t know what’s with that, all I wanted to do is draw a straight line! That kind of worked. I guess if you do it too slow it’s like freaking out. All right let’s just exit out of there, that’s cool I like that. 

Now I wonder if till run in Windows because I think there’s a separate installation or something for Windows but we’ll see here in a moment. Whoa nope holy crap, it’s doing stuff I don’t know, if that’s correct because it kind of just seems like its in... yeah it’s in mouse emulation mode. Mouse just stopped working what that what the dick hmm apparently it’s just, nothing is working not even the regular mouse. Oh it just... just crapped itself, yeah, I have no clue what’s going on. 

No mouse device of any kind is working at the moment, so it’s time to go troubleshoot and I’ll be back! Hopefully. All right so I just cleared out everything and reinstalled and it seems to be working again or at least it loaded the driver and whatnot, so uh. And now the mouse just crapped itself again, it just totally stopped working. Something is not right that’s for sure. I think it’s working again that’s the mouse click sound. So were gonna try SimCity here because I don’t know what else to do. Well I mean that that kind of works.  

Yay, copy protection. Well that is, uh it’s not very fun to move the mouse this way in fact it’s terrible. Continue, okay, I gotta try out some other mode cuz this is not gonna work. So there is this utility here that lets you do things it’s like some diagnostics or whatever. So there’s an emulation type of the mouse here to choose between relative, glass mouse, or absolute. We have absolute chosen hopefully that’s a little better than relative. So this is absolute mode this makes a little bit more sense. So instead of like, having to move it around relatively, you could just tap like that. And well its... well anyway. 

Okay! So this is kind of cool, like seriously I like that. When it’s like, you know large things that you can actually tap this makes a whole lot of sense. Now obviously it’s not necessarily ideal cuz this game is not made for it, but it does work. Really as far as the resolution for the types of touches that it can recognize its pretty high relative to others of the time period, but little things like that are just not like ideal. 

The fact that it kind of does work is pretty fringing sweet. So this is glass mouse mode, it’s like relative mode but just way more sensitive. I still don’t know why Windows isn’t working, it should be. I’ve installed the Windows things it’s in, you know, mouse emulation mode here. Its working for DOS programs but I mean, it says Windows supports installed. I don’t know man, just don’t know. I guess it’s not meant to be. 

Well see now I’m just really curious, and I’ve got to try Duke Nukem 3D. Which this is not a very fast computer so it’s probably gonna run like garbage, but it’s worth it for science! All right it’s time to try the 8516, lets rock! 

And hope that it works, does it work? Oh okay here we go, I got it, I can do this hey oh my goodness I think the sensitivity is a little high, put it all the way down and see what happens. Okay that’s a little absurd but it works. So I have mouse as moving right now and I’m just shooting with the keyboard. Which in hindsight maybe I should have done click to do it but whatever I didn’t. So every time its beeping I’m actually clicking the mouse.

Here we go, oh, this is exhausting, ah, my arm is hurting so much! Okay jump There we go, alright I got this! I’m Duke Nukem! And open that door no there’s a guy behind me! It’s really hard to turn around. Ran out of ammo dang it!

No can’t let this happen! I’m better than this! Oh I guess I’m not. Blame it on the touchscreen. Well that’s it for this episode of LGR Oddware, and I hope that you enjoyed it! I certainly think this is a pretty neat little monitor when it works. And yeah that’s just unfortunate that I wasn’t able to get it working with Windows 3 even though I’ve seen it working with it, I know that it does. 

And I mean, it’s meant to do that but for whatever reason my configuration is just not working, whether it be the monitor having issues or the computer itself or the software, who knows what. It’s just not meant to be today. 

But I will be revisiting touchscreen CRT solutions again in the future so I’m sure that won’t be the only chance that we get to look at Windows 3 with a touchy-feely CRT. So if you would like to see some of those than I recommend sticking around.  On all sorts of topics not just Oddware, of course. Its software and games and whatever else I happen to want to cover whenever I want to cover it! It’s just kind of what I do. thank you very much for watching.