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Engelbart's Keyboard Available For Touchscreens

Posted by timothy on from the so-you-can-drive-too dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Doug Engelbart should be known to everyone on Slashdot — he did invent the mouse after all, among many other inventions all of us rely on today. There was one more obscure device he came up with that never really took off, though. It was called the Chorded Keyboard, and consisted of a system that allowed you to type using just one hand. The key to this system was finger combinations, which allowed up to 32 different characters — more than enough for the alphabet. Now that one-handed keyboard has been ported to work with touchscreens, and it could end up being quite popular. The key benefit is the fact you can type anywhere on the screen and don't even need to see where you are typing. The only difficulty is learning all the key combos, but once you have them cold you may be able to type faster than with two hands on your smartphone or tablet." Bonus: being software-only and open-source, it's much cheaper than a Twiddler.

2 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. This doesn't seem as useful as stenotype by tlambert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Stenotype, which is used for both court reporting and closed captioning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype can typically be operated at 300WPM.

    It has the advantage that you can already take classes in it, and that there are tons of people already trained to use it.

    I guess Paul Wittgenstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wittgenstein might appreciate it.

    -- Terry

  2. OpenGenera for Linux by klapaucjusz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I deeply desire to have a Symbolics machine of my own some day—or at least a version of OpenGenera that boots properly.

    You won't have one properly licensed, since the courts were unable to agree who owns the copyrights to Genera. On the other hand, that means you cannot be sued by the copyright holders, since nobody is quite sure who the copyright holders are.

    You'll need:

    Setting it up requires a little bit of work (you'll need to set up a local NFS server and to tweak your X server's modifier mappings), but I warmly recommend it -- it's complete enough to do some real work in Emacs, and the full sources and documentation are there for your greater enjoyment.