Slashdot Mirror
Engelbart's Keyboard Available For Touchscreens
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.
Wait, fellow poster! Please reconsider before you write that joke!
Just wait till the Emacs people come along... they're gonna have a gasm. Wait for all the keybindings in 3.... 2... 1....
C|N>K
I have two hands you insensitive clod!
-
There was an early 'palm' computer around '90/1/2 (in the UK) that was very similar to this. It had a keyboard of five keys mapped to the positions of the fingers on one hand, but could, in the right 'hand' be used quite efficiently as a one hand 'keyboard' input device. Fucked if I can remember what it was called, but I do remember someone being quite proficient with it. Any ideas what it was? It would have been around the time of the Atari Portfolio/Early Psion machines.
Unless my life depended on it, I doubt I could ever train myself to use 32+ memorized "chords" to type all of the letters and numbers.
Unless my life depended upon it, I doubt I could ever train myself to use a 101+ key keyboard...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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
Yes, I can see the learning curve is steep, I must be missing something, though, because lowercase letters (26), uppercase letters (26), digits (10), punctuation (26), and "meta" keys like Escape, Tab, Backspace, Delete, and enter (to name a few) exceeds the 32 chorded characters mentioned in TFA.
I've often wondered if Morse Code could be a viable option for data entry on a small screen. Admittedly, there are some punctuation and capitalization issues with this, as well. Yet, it WOULD permit one to text while not requiring one to keep their gaze on the screen.
I suppose one could split the screen in half (e.g. left/right) to distinguish lowercase from uppercase and to allow additional symbols to be defined. I doubt I'm the first to think of this, but I've not seen anything like this being available, I thought I'd toss it out for consideration and discussion.
Luckily for you you don't have to memorize it, as the function of every key is written on them.
Look up a product called the FrogPad. One-handed keyboard (comes in left and right-handed versions). Does punctuation and backspace (and arrows, and other special keys).
I don't think it'd be that hard to learn a chorded keyboard, but I've never tried so I'm not sure. However, there is a big difference between those and regular keyboards: with a regular keyboard, if you touch type, you're relying on positional memory. Every key is in a particular place, and never moves. Chorded keyboards don't have this; you get different characters through different motions of the keys, and you have to move multiple keys at once for each different character. Maybe it's not so easy.
That said, I don't see how this keyboard can possibly work if it only has 32 combinations, unless there's some extra modifier keys that you use with the other hand or something. Between lower-case, upper-case, numerals, special characters, and others (F-keys, insert/delete/home/etc.), you need a minimum of 84 keys to replace a standard 101-key keyboard, and a couple more if you want those stupid Windows keys.
I find your lack of capital letters disturbing.
Ha! With my typing system, I needn't use more than just one finger!
PS: any advice on getting first post? It seems impossible.
(or what joke were you referring to?)
I read "Twiddler" and it makes me think The Batman has been reduced from stalking Master Criminals to now pursuing Masturbaters...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I remember, long ago, when the guy first brought out this keyset. Some University, MIT as I recall but that may be wrong, tested the learning curve with two groups of people. One learning typewriter type touch typing and the other doing the same exercises and investing the same number of hours on this thing. At the end the "chorded keyset" students tested almost twice the speed with approx. the same error rate. Supposedly a few "freaks" were able to type two different documents at the same time using both hands.
They were sold for a few years. I always wanted to get one but never seemed to have the time.
In the early 90's I remember reading that the military tested a modification of the idea that used a wrist strap with sensors to detect the movements of the fingers without actually using a keyboard. The idea was that astronauts in zero-G and pilots under high G could use it.
Seems like that could be a terrific solution for tablets and desktops alike. Make the wrist strap wireless and away you go.
Since it is very common to hold a tablet with one hand, it would be interesting if someone would build a tablet with pressure senors on the back and side (for your thumb) so that the hand holding the tablet could type just be squeezing. Make the entire back of the tablet pressure sensitive so you don't have to worry about lining your fingers up, just let the software figure out which finger is which based on the relative location of each press/squeeze.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Did you see the bit on Leno where they had two kids texting over phones, race to hams with radios using morse code? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfyf5Y5AHNc Morse code won easily and handily by a huge margin. I know one of the hams (Chip), he said it was clear during rehearsal that morse code was going to win by a mile. It's actually pretty easy to send morse code, and as you say easy to do in a clandestine fashion. Copying, though, requires practice, practice, practice. Until it becomes a key skill in modern video games I don't see lots of kids learning the code.
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.
Someone's apparently working on an open-source input method for stenotype (Plover):
http://lwn.net/Articles/475408/
Jon Postel, who ran the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for many years, used Engelbart's NLS system to manage all of the information for IANA. He used a mouse and chord keyboard. I was interested at one time in user interface issues, and I'm located in L.A., so Jon kindly allowed me to interview him and watch him work (the Internet was a far smaller and more friendly place back then). NLS was designed to use these two devices in concert. The usage model was of a hypertext, with a mouse click on an item followed by a single-letter command. The command letters were typed in on the chord keyboard, at two chords per character. The scheme was to type in 8- or 9-bit characters as bits, five high bits followed by five low bits, or the other way around, I don't remember which. The effect was that to manipulate information, as opposed to entering it, you didn't have to move your hands back and forth to and from the keyboard. Just click-chunk-chunk, click-chunk-chunk.
At two chords per character, and with pretty clunky-chunky piano-type keys on the chord keyboard, entering more than a few characters via chord keyboard was slower and more painful than using a regular keyboard. I asked Jon how many characters he would type on the chord keyboard before switching to the regular keyboard, and his answer was, "About ten."
Jon was probably the last user of NLS aside from Doug & Friends. I believe ISI, where Jon worked, kept a PDP-10 running just to support his use of NLS in running IANA.