Designers Unearth Apple Tablet Prototypes — From 1983
Here’s a blast from the past: In the early 1980s, an industrial design firm helped create some early prototypes of tablets for a young Steve Jobs.
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The tablet was called “Bashful,” in reference to the dwarf in the fairy tale Snow White. Bashful was created alongside the Apple IIe as an extension of the Snow White industrial-design language that Apple used from 1984 to 1990.
Now Frog Design, the firm that created those mock-ups, has unearthed some photos from its archives that show what the tablet might have looked like more than 25 years ago. With Apple expected to unveil its long-awaited tablet device on Wednesday, it seems like a good time to bring these photos out of the archives, Frog Design’s people thought.
There are none of the sleek contours that characterize Apple’s products today. But you can still see the emphasis on ease-of-use and a slim profile (relatively speaking, anyway). And it shows how long Jobs has been mulling the idea of bringing a tablet to market.
Variations of the Bashful tablet included one with an attached keyboard and one with a floppy-disk drive and a handle for portability. Some of the tablet prototypes included a stylus. And one concept even had an attached phone.
Frog Design also helped create the Apple IIc, the fourth in the wildly popular Apple II line of personal computers.
The Bashfuls never made it to market, and the prototypes are probably still in the hidden, underground storage vaults of Apple or Frog Design.
Take a look at more photos of the prototype tablets below.
Photos: Frog Design
