For many years in my presentations, I have talked about the QWERTY keyboard and its relationship to modern computers. The QWERTY keyboard made a lot of sense when it was part of a mechanical device and they had to create a way to make sure the keys didn't stick when you were typing. But with a computer keyboard, this wasn't necessary at all. Yet here we are, 140 years after the invention of QWERTY and it's still probably used on 99% of keyboards.
But, we're starting to see some new paradigms for computer interface being developed right now, the most notable is the gesture interfaces used on many cell phones. But leave it to CMU and Microsoft to come up with the body as the input device. As we move away from the interface conventions of the past, we'll be seeing a lot more experiments in how we engage the computers in the future.
Related Post: MIT's Sixth Sense - Polinchock's Ponderings.