I love weird old computing dead ends like this. Pretty good ideas at the wrong time and place in history to allow them to take off. I mean, no mouse in 1987? Ta

I love weird old computing dead ends like this. Pretty good ideas at the wrong time and place in history to allow them to take off. I mean, no mouse in 1987? Task-focused rather than general purpose? I remember reading about them when they were new; Amiga was my obsession by then (though I couldn't afford one for another couple years), but I devoured all the computing media I could get my hands on. They seemed like a toy, to me, and a very expensive one, to boot. It's cool to imagine what the world would have looked like had we gone down different paths. If this had come a year or two earlier, been a few hundred dollars cheaper, maybe we'd be using a very different sort of computer today. But, probably not. The GUI/mouse interface has been an unbeatable monster for decades now. The windowing GUI may have just been delayed by a year or two. Nerds (myself included) kinda pine for the pre-mouse days now and then, but even so, I don't know a lot of people who use an exclusively text-based UI. I like a tiled window manager and a text editor that's most controllable via keyboard, but I also like having a mouse.