In our last article we told you all about how LCD screens work . In that piece, we talked a little about the history of LCDs and how important they’ve been to the rise of personal mobile electronics like smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Today we’re going to talk about another crucial component of this technological revolution: the touchscreen. The first touchscreens were designed in the 1960s, but the technology was expensive and imprecise. It wasn’t until the 1990s that there were serious attempts to bring touchscreen technology into the consumer world. IBM was the first company to attempt to bring the technology to mobile phones, with the Simon in 1993, while Sega made an aborted attempt to incorporate touchscreen technology into mobile gaming. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, with the introduction of PDAs and early smartphones, that touchscreens began to see use in mobile electronics. Pretty much all modern touchscreens fall into two basic categories: resistive touchscreen...