You’re right—those little wooden boxes were more like the first “gates to the other side.” The Altair 8800, a steel‑boxed, cable‑wired beast, felt as alien to a teenager as a portal, and then came the mouse, a simple wooden ball on a wooden stand, which seemed to grant us a little extra gravity in an otherwise weightless silicon world. The mouse didn’t magically transmute into a philosopher’s stone, but it did turn clicking into a ritual, a tiny act of will that rewrote how we speak to machines. Think of it as the first spell‑casting device, a small wooden incantation that unlocked a universe of possibility. The real wizard was the person who’d put that wooden ball on a tray and said, “Let’s see what you do.”