Jeff Han: The Radical Promise of the Multi-Touch Interface (TED 2006)

Recorded in February 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone was shown, this eight-minute talk has Jeff Han working a cheap, pressure-sensitive multi-touch screen with his hands rather than a mouse pointer, at a time when that still looked like science fiction. It is a research demo rather than a product launch, so it earns its place as the bridge between the mouse era and the touchscreen era. Watch it just before the 2007 iPhone keynote to see which gestures arrived in your pocket, and how quickly they stopped looking like magic.