&gt; advanced alien technology<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be so sure. USB, for example, isn&#x27;t that different from RS-232, it&#x27;s just faster.<p>There were people in the 70s (I was one of them) looking to build a handheld tablet. We were defeated (obviously) by the needed display and miniaturization technology being a couple orders of magnitude (at least) inadequate. Our ideas were awfully crude by current tablet standards, but we would have recognized a modern tablet, just like I would have recognized my current desktop as not conceptually that different from an LSI-11 box with a terminal.