It was a long road from the punched card systems of the first room-sized computer cabinets to today's gesture and voice-con­ trolled virtual worlds. Nevertheless, more and more people are now coming to grips with esoteric computer technology. Inter­ faces between man and computer, i.e. all means of soft and hardware communicati­ on with computers, are of key importance in computer science providing engineers and designers alike with plenty of scope for new developments. It's worth recalling here just how difficult things were in the early stages of (personal) computing, par­ ticularly for non-professionals. Cryptic instruction chains had to be learned by heart and the only input device was the keyboard. However, some clever bods in California soon came up with the first PC comprising a more intuitive user interface, the Apple Macintosh.