luca@rabbit.UUCP (09/01/83)
I would like to get chord keyboards of any kind (commercial, prototypes, etc.) for use in conjunction with mice in blit terminals. Left-handed keyboards preferred. Does anybody know who sells them or makes them or plays with them? Mail to rabbit!luca or research!luca.
dvorak@houem.UUCP (09/01/83)
While I worked for Xerox Research I saw hundreds of Altos--with their mice, of course. There was also available a chord keyboard for the Alto, but NO ONE ever used them. In fact, three years passed before I knew they existed for use with the Alto because the keyboards were either stuffed in the back of drawers or thrown away. This observation is meant as a POTENTIAL indication of the relative utility(or lack thereof) of chord keyboards vs. mice. The important qualification is that the software available for use with the Altos was very likely developed with the mouse in mind; however, I think it is fair to say that the keyboard limitations drove this direction. The advanced text editors, CAD packages, games and graphics tools that had the best features all used the mouse. My opinion is that, for the overwhelming majority of applications, the chord could at best complement the mouse, and certainly not replace it. Using both a mouse and a chord keyboard effectively could be real tricky from a human factors point of view-- consider what happens with the BLIT when you move around the screen from layer to layer: the button assignments change, etc. Adding to this great flexibility (and therefore potential complexity) the mental "load" of a left-handed keyboard (with other assignments) might be a little too much.
jfarrell@sun.UUCP (Jerry Farrell) (09/05/83)
I know of at least 2 exceptions to dvorak's observation that the chordsets were never used with the Altos at PARC: A brown-bag editor oriented toward coding rather than document production (i.e., not Bravo), called "ugh" -- or "UG" for all I know; I only heard it. Its adherents were enthusiastic about not trying to force block structured code into a sentence & paragraph text mold. MazeWar, the net networked search & destroy game, accepts commands from either the keyboard or mouse & chordset. For non-novices. the chordsets improve performance by factors of 4 - 10 or more. That is, playing even, McGregor would shoot me 9 or 10 times for every one I got him; using a chordset and restricting him to ASDFG for the motion commands, I almost could catch him. Note thsat in this configuration, I used the chordset in my RIGHT (dominant) hand, for Step Back, Turn Left, Step Ahead, Turn Right, and Turn 180; the mouse is strictly a source of 3 more buttons: Peek Left, Shoot, Peek Right. I eventually learned to imitate the experts' strategy: run fast & shhot often; don't bother hiding or peeking. The proliferation of systems at Xerox which use big left-hand function keys (Alto II keyboards with BravoX and others; Star, various internal development environments) could be seen as trading the mose-and-chordset's indefference to handedness for labels on the keycaps & slightly easier manufacture. [God, my typing is atrocious today. apologies to my readers, and curses to the implementor of this interface.] `v