Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!rutgers!netsys!vector!killer!ltf
From: ltf@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Lance Franklin)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Alternative Keyboards
Message-ID: <6879@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Date: 21 Jan 89 07:52:56 GMT
References: <400009@hpdsla.HP.COM> <408@thor.wright.EDU>
Reply-To: ltf@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Lance Franklin)
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection BBS, Dallas, Tx
Lines: 23

Whatever happened to the keyboard I once saw in an long-ago Popular Electronics
that was basically a hemisphere with keys placed under each finger (with the
hand draped over the hemisphere) and three keys placed within reach of the 
thumb.  Data was entered by depressing the four finger-keys (to allow 16 
possible binary choices), then depressing one of the three thumb-keys (to
enter the value and choose one of three character groups).  Supposedly,
a sufficiently practiced keyboard-operator could enter data faster with this
keyboard than with the standard qwerty-operator, and it left the other hand
free to flip pages, guzzle cokes and handle twinkies.  Since this setup
could handle only 48 possible characters, I assume it used a shift-in/shift-
out mechanism to handle upper/lower case.  Really, it was QUITE a few years
back, so my memory of the thing is hazy.
 
Did anybody ever build one of these things?
 
Lance


-- 
+-------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------+
| Lance T Franklin        | | I never said that! It must be some kind of a  |
| ltf@killer.DALLAS.TX.US | | forgery...I gotta change that password again. |
+-------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------+