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From: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Chords (was Re: a plea to Apple -- something for the offhand
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Date: 30 Jul 90 20:05:29 GMT
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In article <90210.161608RCW101@psuvm.psu.edu> RCW101@psuvm.psu.edu (The 
Fiend) writes:
> I once saw a very interesting input device, not sure what it was called,
> connected to a Silicon-Graphics workstation. This device has a ball, 
about the
> size of a baseball, which could be moved around on a stick (kind of like 
a
> joystick), plus it had two rows of (I think) 5 buttons in front of it.

It's called a Spaceball, which is probably somebody's trademark.  The idea 
is that the ball can be pushed in all 6 orthogonal directions or twisted 
around I don't remember how many axes.  I have played with one, but I was 
not all that impressed.  It's a binary first-derivative device, so one has 
to push or twist and wait for the object to move around in its own good 
time.  I found this frustrating.  Personally, I far prefer a mouse and the 
virtual trackball algorithm by Michael Chen et. al.  With spring-loaded 
constraints to rotate around the object's and the viewer's major axes and 
a trackball with inertia, it is almost obscenely pleasant to use.

In re. chord keyboards, some years ago there was a hemispherical device 
that had four buttons for the fingers and eight buttons for the thumb.  
The four buttons would be played as a chord to determine the bottom four 
bits of the ASCII code, and one of the eight buttons would be pressed to 
determine the top three bits.  At the time, the price was considerably 
less than the average price of a QWERTY keyboard, so maybe they sold a few.

A long time ago, I played around with a chord-entering system for 
hexadecimal data using the four fingers of each hand on a TRS-80 Model 1.  

Eric Pepke                                    INTERNET: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute MFENET:   pepke@fsu
Florida State University                      SPAN:     scri::pepke
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052                    BITNET:   pepke@fsu

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