10. Navigation

Navigation has changed significantly over the years. Before the existence of GPS and turn-based directions spoken aloud by a box that fits on your dashboard, sailors navigated using the stars. Navigation has been impacted by inventions ranging from the compass to the computer. Eventually, instead of looking to the skies, companies began filling them with manmade machines. Today navigation is accomplished through the aid of satellites, wireless signals, and computer software.

Application navigation hasn’t changed much over the years. Nested menus with keyboard shortcuts and buttons were as much in evidence 20 years ago as they are today. Today we measure the speed of computers using gigahertz and include a processor count. In 1989, the 8-bit Commodore 64, which was named for the whopping 64 kilobytes of memory it possessed (over 1/30,000^th of a typical 2GB computer today) ran at a mere 2.6 MHz, yet was able to execute a graphical user interface that supported a mouse and came with point-and-click menus.