Button Technology

Okay, I need to get serious here for a second and talk about button
technology. What's amazing is not how far buttons have come (the ones on computers like in 2001 a Space Odyssey not the ones you wear when you hate the president), but how limited our vision of buttons was. It seems all buttons were seen as the same back in the '60s and '70s,...large, square things that light up and occasionally blink (like the picture). As far as I can remember, their was a button for everything. If you want to turn on the reflector shields, you don't type in on a keyboard, you don't say it outloud, you hit the reflector shield button and your power is transfers to the reflector shields. If you want to go to hyperspace, just hit the button, one touch and away you go.

Its cool that the people who dream of this technology, could picture space ships and HAL and all that future stuff, could not vision a better button. I could be wrong, but I don't think NASA uses exclusively buttons, rather, I think most actions are typed into a keyboard and it goes from there. I've also seen a handful of switches, but very few buttons. They certainly do not light up with bright purples and fluorescent blues and I have yet to see a whole panel of buttons anywhere.

It is possible we just have not hit that point in button technology yet, that one day we will realize the importance of large, bright buttons. When will this day come, only time will tell...only time will tell.