Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!cognos!geovision!gd
From: gd@geovision.gvc.com (Gord Deinstadt)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: the interface for the rest of us?
Message-ID: <1546@geovision.gvc.com>
Date: 5 May 91 16:32:45 GMT
References: <9105021606.AA26962@lti2.lti.uucp> <1991May3.204023.6661@ico.isc.com> <1991May4.172440.1851@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Organization: GeoVision Corp., Ottawa, Ontario
Lines: 29

mccoy@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Jim Mccoy) writes:

>What if they already enter a lot of information by pen and paper?  I
>can point out a HUGE market for thkese machines if/when they ever drop
>in price:  education.   As a college student, I would kill for one of
>those machines right now.  I write many pages of notes by hand, use
>several notebooks for different classes.  I can write notes by hand
>much faster than anyone I have ever known can type, and my notes have
>spatial and visual cues that your would find difficult to reproduce if
>just using a keyboard.

Having recently gone back to school, I sympathise... but I can type a lot
faster than I can write.  And I can type in the dark, which is useful
when viewing slides (actually, I can write in the dark too; the problem
is reading it afterwards!).  So if I had the choice I'd take a laptop
with a full-size keyboard.

But I'd want a stylus for entering the graphical bits.

I'd like to type in my exams too.  On one exam I was asked to write
5000 words in 3 hours; my physical limit is about 1200/hour when hand
writing (my fingers just won't move faster).

When I was in school the first time, studying electronics, none of this
was a problem.  Most of my notes were graphical (schematics and charts);
most of my exam time was spent calculating and drawing.  Now I'm taking
humanities things are very different.
--
Gord Deinstadt  gdeinstadt@geovision