Enthusiasm for a new input method is worth reading long afterwards for one reason: it shows which guesses were about the technology and which were about people. The guesses here are that a large multi-touch surface would land in a disc jockey's booth, on a photo studio's light table, and wherever else a pair of hands already did the work — that a screen you touch with several fingers would replace the surfaces professionals lean over.

What happened is that multi-touch arrived, immediately and completely, on the small screen in a pocket rather than on the large one on a desk. The reason is the arms: holding them out to a vertical display tires them within minutes, and a horizontal table leaves nowhere to sit. Where large touch surfaces did take hold — a mixing desk, a kiosk, a control panel — they replaced buttons rather than a mouse. The prediction was right about the gesture and wrong about the furniture.