Story by Emmjay

One of the best things about being a cyber dinosaur is that it is easier for us to see the broad sweep of silicon history than it might be for say, our kids.  These little tackers (well young adults, really) regard everything cyber as situation normal, nothing to see, part of the landscape.

It was always this way.

No, it wasn’t.

In the last 60 years we have seen at least six distinct eras;

• The mainframe
• The minicomputer
• The microcomputer
• The rise of the Internet
• The rise of the mobile phone and its evolution into the smartphone
• The emergence of the tablets.

We have seen the rise and fall – with a few notable exceptions of great dynasties and the incessant tinyfication and acceleration of everything.

These have been no mean technical feats.  When I started to use computers in the late 1970s, I got to run one – or on a good day, two programs on a computer that cost millions of dollars.  It involved booking a punch machine in advance, punching hundreds of cards and feeding them into an amazing high speed card reader so that the chunk of instructions and data could get Into another queue and shuffle its way towards the sacred CPU and then onto the hallowed line printer which would (nine times out of ten) cough up a message some time later that day.

I used to ride the departmental bicycle over to the computer centre and pick up the print out saying “error43178”.  This was bad. I had to find the manual and learn what bone-headed mistake in my typing had wasted everyone’s precious time.  Probably a comma out of place.  Then find the offending card.  Of course that was only the first offending card.  Next trip across campus I would find the second one – and so on.  So computing was really good for my calves but almost as good at teaching patience. Until some bastard stole the departmental bicycle.

Technological speed increases and miniaturisation go hand in hand with less power consumption and therefore less chip-killing heat.  Fortunately the march of technology has been a catholic venture, spreading the benefits around.  Our modest phones store volumes of data that were unimaginable in 1970. But more significant benefits have roared through what cyberists call the user interface.  Older dinosaurs than me remember paper tape input – preceding cards, then, wonder of wonders, my own keyboard. Still in the hunt, the keyboard, still the annoying design born of speed-challenged typewriters, but wireless now and virtual (he said madly tapping his touchscreen iPad).

Then Apple popularised the mouse as a pointing device, invented some time earlier by Xerox.  I remember fondly a Tennant cartoon of the first mainframe mouse*.  It was a dodgem car linked to the computer by a cable as thick as your arm, and it was driven like rally cars – with a man sitting in the driver’s seat and a navigator saying “Whoa, bud, back it up ! Back it UP!”

Now for the patient, the point of this story.  I have a lovely Apple MacBook Air.  It’s a simple ultralight notebook computer with adequate performance, long battery life and a beautifully clear screen.  It has a touchpad (which I have never liked…. On any notebook computer I have owned) so I use a cordless Bluetooth mouse.

This is but one of my tools of trade.  I also use a smartphone with a delightful touch screens and lately an iPad.

I have become so used to using gestures on a touch screen that I found myself swiping the screen of the MacBook Air, wondering why the onscreen page didn’t turn like it does on the phone and the iPad.  I have clearly turned the corner and fallen into an open grave.  The patiently-waiting grave of the mouse.

Can you see the tombstone?  Mouse, born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s, went to college in the 90s, worked hard in the noughties, retired in the twenty teens and passed away quietly in the bottom drawer in the 2020s.

There you have it. 2020 foresight.

Vale in advance, little rodent pointer.

*  You can see and buy a copy of this little beauty of a cartoon  – watermarked to death – unless you want to stump up $150 to use it for six months on  a blog like this….

http://www.the5thwave.com/cartoon/3844