If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. You can find us on Twitter here. Thanks for visiting!

Devices touch us just as much as we touch them. We need to connect, select and direct! The connection we have is through something called an interface or simply put, an input device. If you have ever turned anything on whatsoever, you have used an input device! Congratulations!
The designers of technology have always strived to make it so that getting out of your chair was the last thing you had to do, so when they invented the television, they did whatever it took to package ‘the remote’. Known as a ‘clicker’ until the early nineties (because they actually had a clicking sound when pressed) this wonder box allowed ‘television viewers’ to no longer be ’stander-uppers’ in order to adjust the volume and channel. This input device requires the user to have fingers, for the best operation possible.

Another finger-based input device that brings tremendous amounts of clicks to our lives is the ‘computer mouse’. The first computer ‘mice’ (plural can be ‘mouses’ if you want) were bulky and had rubber bands in them. But, we have worked our way to wireless versions and better yet, ones you don’t even have to have a mouse pad for. With the rise of non-DOS based (or BASIC based for that matter) computers came a need to point and click at icons on the screen. The human connection here is that we got tired of typing in line after line of DOS commands (kind of like the aggravation of having to standing up as previously mentioned) and we just wanted to click on the file and have it open. Cool!

Now for the fun stuff: Video games! The history of the ‘controller’ is fabled and true. We love our ‘joysticks’ because they put US in control and oh, what joy they brought! First, you had ‘paddles’. This was a bad choice to name the first turning knob type controllers, but who likes the name ‘turning knob’? But, they worked great with Pong so paddles it is. Next would be the eight way Atari controllers that instead of just up and down you now had sideways to go. This was crucial to avoid the bats in the caves underneath the alligators you just swang over. Nowadays, we have left, right, up, down, forward, backward, shoot, duck, jump, map, pause, dunk, and ‘use potion’ to deal with. That’s a lot of buttons.

And where would be if nobody thought to take a typewriter and hook it into a computer? Yes, punch cards. Someone, somewhere said, “What if we could program computers to recognize ‘words’ and type those ‘words’ so that a computer could understand them? This is the ultimate in finger pressing and input devices: the keyboard. Now it is possible to take something WE as humans invented and force it upon computers instead of computers forcing US to not have to read. Now we have the upper hand (as long as those hands have fingers, of course.)