Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!pinocchio.encore.com!bzs
From: bzs@pinocchio.encore.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Real Time Handwriting Recognition
Message-ID: <8812290102.AA28765@pinocchio.UUCP>
Date: 29 Dec 88 01:02:35 GMT
References: <83242@sun.uucp>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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About five years ago I interviewed for a job with a company in
Waltham, MA (I forget their name) which was doing handwriting
analysis.  Their system only worked with printing but it seemed to do
quite well (I tried it.)

At the time their software was running on PDP11/70's and one reason
they were talking to me was to transfer it to other machines, the
IBM/PC I guess was an obvious target. With its 256KB address space it
seemed ideal to them (an 11/70 only has 64KB instruction, 64KB data
space.)

Their application targets were places like govt offices (eg. the motor
vehicle department), it was easy to put their software into the
context of a form to fill out, and "hands busy" situations (eg. phone
sales.)

Other than perhaps shorthand experts I was never terribly impressed
with this technology as a general input device (except, as they
intended, in areas dealing with the general public although I'm not
sure that speed is the only interest, hunt and pecking with feedback
would still get a good form filled out.)

I think people seriously underestimate how good keyboards are for
entering text. The govt should invest in teaching typing starting at
the grade school level, that alone would justify making lots of cheap
computers available to public schools, forget what software the kids
run. If they learn to type you've opened new vistas of possibilities
for them.

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||