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In the science fiction film Tron (1982) by Stephen Lisberger, the head of the software company Tron owns an 'intelligent' glass table that allows communication with a so-called master control program by means of a touch-sensitive surface.

28 years later, I'm sitting in the subway writing the beginning of this article about just such a surface on Apple's redefinition of the computer, the iPad.Because this is exactly what - no less, but no more - this device dubbed magical by Apple's PR machinery is. It is the future of computing and the swan song for the user-computer interaction paradigm that has dominated the last 25 years. Until now, operating a computer with a graphical user interface required a keyboard and mouse.

Now you only need your fingers, which enable interaction either through finger gestures or input via a virtual keyboard.

The iPad keyboard

Typing on a glass surface is surprisingly smooth. While my concerns about how to write on a small screen like the iPhone were quite high, these are dispelled with the iPad.To get short text passages from a page into the device, the virtual screen keyboard is more than sufficient.For longer texts, however, the use of an external keyboard is recommended. The future will show whether the existing paradigm of interaction has come to an end. But ultimately, it is not the 'how' that decides a text, but the 'what'.