Let's pause for a moment to hail the 40th birthday of the mouse.

When it first hit mainstream use, it was a highly controversial device. People used to keyboards struggled with lifting their fingers onto a separate gadget to get things done. For a certain breed of computer user, used to instructing computers by firing complex strings of commands at them via a text based command line, the mouse was a revolting means of dumbing down computing.

You still see echoes of this battle today, with some Linux devotees arguing the superiority of command line vs GUI interfaces, best summed in this line from a Slashdot contributor: "The command line is like writing a poem, while using a mouse is like pointing and grunting."

But the real value of the mouse was not that it made computers easier to use, but it helped enable whole classes of applications that were inconceivable without it. The first time I saw QuarkExpress, around 15 years ago, was a revelation, given that I had previously been using a painful HTML-type language to layout and style documents practically a letter at a time.

That's why I am sceptical about pronouncements of its impending demise. The mouse never killed the command line, it just banished it to the server room. The mouse may end up similarly relegated as funky new means of interaction enable computers to be used in powerful new ways, but it won't die. It's still too damn useful.