landon@Apple.COM (Landon Dyer) (07/25/89)
> (The nice thing about the Chord keyboard is that all the keys are in one > unified place. No more manufacturers coming out with their own 'Querty' > keyboards where the control, alt, return, and shift keys are of varying sizes > and locations! Of course, they can still mess you up by changing which > "chords" mean what characters, but I think they'd standardize REAL quick. > Either that, or they don't get to sell much equipment! Most likely, the chords > would be based closely on the ASCII byte values for the characters.) ^^^^^^^^^^ Argh! That's more like a front panel than a chord keyboard! I don't think many people would put up with that. A counterexample, from memory: The IBM Chord Keyboard has fourteen keys; two rows of five for the fingers, and a row of four for the thumb. You don't type just on the keys themselves, but rather, on dimples between keys: +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | | | | | | | O O O O O O O O O | | | | | | | +--O--O--O--O--O--O--O--O--O--+ | | | | | | | O O O O O O O O O | | | | | | | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ ^^ finger keys (10 keys, 27 dimples) vv thumb keys (4 keys, 7 dimples) +-----+-----+-----+-----+ | | | | | (the thumb keys can slide | O O O O O O O | over HERE, for lefties) | | | | | +-----+-----+-----+-----+ Each dimple is labeled with a letter or something; there's a numeric keypad embedded in there, too. The seven thumb dimples are labeled Reverse, Numeric, Macro, Shift, Control and so forth. The cute thing is that you can type words like 'THE' in one stroke (by pressing the 'T' 'H' and 'E' dimples simultaneously, and then letting go). Dimples normally go left-to-right, but the Reverse thumb dimple reverses the sequence, so you can type 'A' 'N' and 'D' even though the dimples are labelled 'DNA'. Naturally you can define macros and do whizzy (?) 3270 type stuff. I think that the original model had a KIM-1 running it, so some kind of status display was available as well. ----------------------------------------- Landon Dyer, Apple Computer, Inc. "Abstraction of Steel, Development Systems Group (MPW) Run-Time of Kleenex." Everything I said here is utter nonsense.