Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ruuinf!piet
From: piet@ruuinf.UUCP (Piet van Oostrum)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Inputting  8-bit characters
Message-ID: <459@ruuinf.UUCP>
Date: 25 May 88 15:10:18 GMT
References: <3279@enea.se> <1199@maccs.UUCP> <29826@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Organization: Univ of Utrecht, Dept of CS
Lines: 36
In-reply-to: lisper-bjorn@CS.YALE.EDU's message of 23 May 88 17:09:38 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.9 of Mon Mar 21 1988 on ruuinf (hcx/ux)

In article <1199@maccs.UUCP> gordan@maccs.UUCP (gordan) writes:

   In article <3279@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
   -Gordan Palameta (gordan@maccs.UUCP) ) writes:
   ->In the long run, perhaps, chord keyboards would be preferable.  There
   ->would probably be a sizeable learning curve, but for sheer speed they'd

	etc..etc..etc...

   This idea is not new at all, but nobody seems particularly anxious to
   market such a device.  Probably for valid reasons... it would have a
   niche market at best (but I'd certainly be part of that market).

In article <29826@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> lisper-bjorn@CS.YALE.EDU (Bjorn Lisper) writes:

   I don't think typing speed would be faster at all, on the contrary I think
   it would be slower. As all keyboard players (in music, that is) know
   sequences of single notes can be played faster than sequences of chords.
   This is because for single notes you can start pushing the next key with
   another finger already when you're releasing the previous one.  Advanced
   typists do exactly this when typing, too. When playing chords, however, you
   have to lift your fingers *before* you can push the keys in the next chord,
   since it is likely that you must use some fingers for both the chords. It
   seems to me that the same will hold for chord keyboards.

Such a beast has been invented and marketed in Holland some years ago. It
was called a Velotype or something similar. I think it had 10 keys or so,
one for each finger, and you had to press one or two keys with each hand to
get a character or a character combination. They showed some typists
keeping at pace with spoken text! I don't know what happened to it, I
haven't heard about it lately.

-- 
Piet van Oostrum, Dept of Computer Science, University of Utrecht
Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands
Telephone: +31-30-531806              UUCP: ...!mcvax!ruuinf!piet