Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!pinocchio.encore.com!bzs
From: bzs@pinocchio.encore.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Keyboards etc...
Message-ID: <8901160212.AA29231@pinocchio.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jan 89 02:12:38 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 57


I think something people are missing is that these various stenography
methods are not nearly accurate, they rely on the secretary going back
over them later and making sense out of them. That really is not
sufficient for most computer applications. I don't even think one can
generally expect one secretary to be able to work from another
secretary's stenography notes unless they are very high quality and
both are familiar with the subject matter and style involved/expected.

Chord keyboards as these reduced keys keyboards are called (because
they involve striking multiple keys simultaneously, like chords on a
piano) have been around for over a decade. I've heard they're quite
useable and I remember seeing one used by an inventory person who
would wander around looking at the shelves and pushing things aside
with one hand while entering counts with the other without looking
down.

I think these, like Dvorak, have the same problem, simple lack of
universality (better put, a chicken and egg problem, until they're
widely used they'll never be widely used.)

Perhaps the problem is they're solving a problem the majority
of people don't particularly feel needs solving?

That's a common effect in the computer industry, wonderfully elegant
solutions to non-problems. It's one of the trickiest things in this
industry to predict the success of and one has to learn how to become
aware of this possibility through painful experience.

Some examples, other than Dvorak keyboards:

1. Bubble memories.

2. Many programming languages (particularly "systems" programming
languages and attempts to pre-process and structure Fortran, I think
I've seen a dozen good tries at the latter)

3. "High-level" programming language
text editors (ie. editors that would detect certain bugs as they were
typed in.)

4. Touch-screens (although they have some following in point-of-sale
applications when they first arrived they were heralded as being the
solution to human interface design and would be ubiquitous.)

5. Large removeable winchesters (making a comeback as data modules but
after the DEC RA60 seemed to languish as a product for several years,
maybe just too big and heavy at the time.)

Actually, that's an interesting topic if we can get over the red-faced
memories, what technological innovations in the recent past did *YOU*
think were going to be the end-all/be-all and just sort of fizzled?

Lisp Machines? Program Verification? Color text terminals? Page-sized
text terminals? ???

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||