The secret of technology's appeal lies in the palm of your hands. This was the subtitle of the editorial article of the New York Times magazine published on November 6, 2000. The magazine carried the title Tech 2010, A Catalog of the Near Future.

I saved the magazine because I thought that it will be interesting to read it in 2010. It is interesting reading already today. And surprisingly accurate.

The computers have always been getting smaller, and, the fact that “small things are big things,” as stated in a Helsinki City Park, was evident in the magazine’s articles.

“Touch is an old sense, more primitive than sight and hearing, and we connect to the world with our hands as much as we do with our eyes or ears. So just as some things look or sound right, the sense that thing feels right can be a powerful, if not altogether rational, persuader.”

James Gorman, the author of the editorial quoted above, could not have been more accurate. Today iPhone and iPod Touch have given a whole new meaning to “touching.” This marks a discontinuity in the sense that all handheld computing devices are going to apply this innovation.

The ads of 7 years ago are also interesting. The current mainstream laptop computers cost today less than the IBM ThinkPad advertised in the magazine, and have typically 60 times the performance. The next seven years will be interesting times.

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