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From: Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.works
Subject: Re: need info on wipe kboard
Message-ID: <12422@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 14-Apr-84 00:55:20 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12422
Posted: Sat Apr 14 00:55:20 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Apr-84 01:41:02 EST
Lines: 30

From:  Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>

Some references to the wipe keyboard may be found in

  E.B. Montgomery, "Bringing Manual Input into the 20th Century:
  New Keyboard Concepts," IEEE Computer, Vol. 15, No. 3, Mar. 1982,
  pp. 11-18.

  K. Ramakrishna, "Wipe Keyboard Slick but Not Practical,"
  IEEE Computer, Vol. 15, No. 8, Aug. 1982, pp. 97-99.

Careful reading of the former has led me to the conclusion that
the wipe keyboard is not an effective entry method, although the
article makes comparisons with QWERTY difficult.  (Comparing
wipes to keystrokes is not fair since some wipes are quite complex
and some keystroke combinations can be done almost in parallel;
word-based statistics ignore the extra wipe per word needed to
enter the terminating space; and comparison of "strokes" needed to
enter the 100 most common words ignores the fact that these short
words are a much smaller fraction of the >>letters<< in normal
text than of the >>words<< in such text.)  I also find it very
suggestive that Montgomery had built several of these wipe
keyboards, but had never tested them for data entry speed against
a QWERTY.

If one had to enter data on a touch-sensitive screen, though,
I suppose wiping would be more efficient than one-finger typing.

					-- Ken Laws
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