Next week sees Steve Jobs on stage giving his Macworld 2008 keynote. Some things are obvious (new Mac Pro announcement this week shows machines starting at $2,798 so there’s a huge gap to be filled below it, probably with a midlevel, headless machine) and rumor speculation is rampant with an ultraportable Mac near the top of the list.

I still have an Apple Newton with an Apple fixed asset tag on it (they didn’t want it back when I left the company in 1999). While I didn’t like it well enough to have paid money for it (even with my employee discount), the handwriting recognition in the 2.0 software was excellent and not rivaled for several years until Microsoft debuted the Tablet PC.

In the spirit of yesterday’s post of how slooowly things move — and that each of us should be grateful and amazed by how far we’ve come in such a short time — let’s pay a little homage to the Newton by viewing this getting started video for the device. Seeing how archaic it seems today will surely make you appreciate the ease-of-use of a touch-enabled iPhone or iPod Touch all the more and get you ready for whatever "one more thing" happens next Tuesday.

I bet it will be "touchy".