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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

This is precisely what CharaChorder is.

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

Yes, that's a really good point.

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