GRiDPad

Going to school during COVID-19 is going to be radically different. You’re going to be on Zoom and socially distancing from your teachers and classmates. You can use laptops, tablets, smartphones, and more today to complete your schoolwork, but what if this pandemic happened in a less connected time? Thankfully, Jeff Hawkins had a solution when it came to tablets: the GRiDPad.

- Jose Alvarez

Hawkins was ahead of his time when it came to speech recognition patterns, paving the way for Siri and Alexa today back in the 1980s. He worked for Intel and, later, GRiD Systems in 1982. He enrolled in the biophysics program at the University of California at Berkeley in 1986 and even patented a “pattern classifier” based on handwritten text for his Ph.D. program, but nobody else at the university were even working in the field. Hawkins took the idea back to GRiD Systems, where he would develop the GRiDPad. GRiD Systems was later acquired by the Tandy Corporation in 1988, and Hawkins would stay on to oversee his creation.