I didn’t ask for much of anything for my 30th birthday. With the one job household and the first child well on the way, it seemed like asking for a bunch of swag for my entry into decade #4 of my existence was selfish. Besides, I have tons of shit. Hard to think of anything that I need, really.
I only asked for one thing from the wife: the new "Magic Trackpad" from the wardens of the Apple Glass Prison (warning: advertisement alert). I like a trackpad, and have no particular affinity for my mouse, so the giant trackpad seemed like a good pick. And I have to say that after using it for the past few days, I can see the mouse spending quite a bit of time in the corner of the desk, with the power switch firmly in the “off” position. The only thing that I have used it for was to go through my latest entry in my computer science course wiki and change the many command names to a bold, courier-new font. Next time, I’ll probably try that with the trackpad, too.
In considering the progress of input peripherals for the computer during my lifetime, I embarked on a bit of a web quest to find an image of a mouse from 1980. The closest I came was this shot of an original MacIntosh with it’s “revolutionary” one-button mouse:
Have I ever mentioned how nice it is to be computing in 2010?