Light Pen

A light pen is a computer input device in the form of a light-sensitive wand used in conjunction with the computer's CRT monitor. It allows the user to point to displayed objects, or draw on the screen, in a similar way to a touch screen but with greater positional accuracy. A light pen can work with any CRT-based monitor, but not with LCD screens, projectors or other display devices.

A light pen is fairly simple to implement. The light pen works by sensing the sudden small change in brightness of a point on the screen when the electron gun refreshes that spot. By noting exactly where the scanning has reached at that moment, the X,Y position of the pen can be resolved. This is usually achieved by the light pen causing an interrupt, at which point the scan position can be read from a special register, or computed from a counter or timer. The pen position is updated on every refresh of the screen.

The light pen became moderately popular during the early 1980s. It was notable for its use in the Fairlight CMI, and the BBC Micro. However, due to the fact that the user was required to hold his or her arm in front of the screen for long periods of time, the light pen fell out of use as a general purpose input device.