Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrehacker | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating read as always Ken. It seems that the concept of a “Chorded Keyboard” from Douglas then spawned several relatively successful successors later on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

Growing up in the Netherlands in the 80s it was hard to not be aware of the “Velotype”: it had more keys and supposedly made it easier to learn the “chords”.

Your reference to the book Nerds 2.0.1 is great, the book is a companion to the excelent PBS 3-part series from 1998

https://archive.org/details/movies?tab=collection&query=Nerd...

View on HN

In the 1990s chorded keyboards were "popular" in regard to wearable computing. People like Steve Mann would give talks where he demonstrated how he could use his wearable computer (basically a laptop he strapped to himself with a clunky goggle-mounted display) that he controlled with a small chorded keyboard he operated with one hand. Obviously, a decade later with smartphones this looked pretty silly (if it didn't already in the 1990s) but some people really did think this was the future at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)

The killer feature of a chorded mechanical (not on-screen) keyboard for me is that one can use it without having to look at it. To literally touch-type (not necessarily text).

This is why such keyboards are used where this advantage is material, e.g. in jet fighters.

The most successful chorded keyboard of all time is the Perkins keyboard used to produce braille. If you already know braille, it's much quicker to learn than touch typing on a regular keyboard because they keys correspond directly to dots in the braille character cell.

And surprisingly, this advantage of not having to look at it also applies blind smartphone users, who can use an on-screen Perkins keyboard as an input method. The touch targets are large enough that you can use it without seeing them once you get used to where they are.

https://www.perkins.org/resource/using-braille-input-your-id...

Not that I’ve seen a blind user using Perkins in real life, but the videos I’ve seen all seem to demonstate the “screen away” mode referenced in this article: turn the phone away from you but cradled in two hands, position your fingers on the screen in roughly the correct position, then you’re ready to start typing. To a blind user, the screen becomes the operating mechanism, and the perception mechanism is typically headphones.

Yes exactly. It's more of a way to make use of many of the other pre-existing functions of the smartphone without having to have a purpose built device. Although there is at least one hardware addon i'm aware of for blind users:

https://www.iamhable.com/en-am

You can learn to touch-type on any keyboard and never ever look at it (actually gets confusing to look), and many where you never have to move your hands around either, before you need to get anywhere near chordal.

True, especially for ergonomic keyboards.

The upside of a chorded keyboard is that it can input a lot while using just one hand, and can be fixed relative just to that hand (imagine e.g. typing while holding a bike handlebar, or, again, an aircraft control stick). Normal touch-typing requires active use of two hands, and a steady surface.

> (actually gets confusing to look)

As someone who grew up with a Swedish keyboard layout, switched to US when I got a job as a programmer but live in Spain so most keyboards have Spanish physical layouts while I use US software layouts: yes, this is very true for a lot of us :)

> In the 1990s chorded keyboards were "popular" in regard to wearable computing. ... Obviously, a decade later with smartphones this looked pretty silly (if it didn't already in the 1990s) but some people really did think this was the future at the time.

Well, we have portable computers with chorded key-sets now: we just call them handheld consoles instead. I'm quite sure that the button set on something like Valve's Steam Deck or ASUS's ROG-Ally consoles could be repurposed for some sort of reasonably ergonomic chorded-text input.

There's a 1990s Alan Alda video interviewing Thad Starner with these elements: https://youtu.be/X7DM1mT8r7c

As Animats mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43455514, Doug's team didn't invent chorded keyboards; Émile Baudot did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code#/media/File:Clavie...

You can see that he designed his character code, like Morse, to make the most common letters easier to send: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code#/media/File:Baudot...

Back in the mid '80s our school was given a small number of Microwriter chorded keyboards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter) for our BBC Micro lab. Even as 12 year olds we were already crazy good touch-typists, so the Microwriter felt very clunky and unintuitive to us. I don't know what the lesson is from that. Just because it seems a good idea doesn't mean that it is. Or typewriter-style keyboards have survived over a century and a half for a reason.

I'm not convinced either of those are the lessons. I think the reason for the keyboard's success is that it has a smooth learning curve. A neophyte can hunt-and-peck with a keyboard. Not so with a chorded keyboard.

but then it kinda stops, couldn’t we layer on chords as well, you can peck “t h e” or just mash “eth” and both would result in “the”, or maybe some sort of english pinyin where only the first few chars are needed?

This is precisely what CharaChorder is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CharaChorder

Predictive text? But it's also an example of an incremental improvement that someone could experiment with to see if it works. Much easier than having to prototype entirely new hardware (especially in the 80s, in an era before cheap additive prototyping).

I mean in some ways that is what modern predictive text is, right? I watch others rely on it incredibly heavily, no correcting mistakes at all just rely on the autocorrect to solve it, and it works well

Or swipe-typing, as another version of that idea. Move in the rough area of the key, and rely on prediction

Yes, that's a really good point.

I guess this was an inspiration for this character https://lain.wiki/wiki/Nezumi

Reply on news.ycombinator.com