I regularly use my Twiddler with my Android phone. It allows me to fully operate all the applications I use on my desktop computer, e.g. Emacs.
https://www.mytwiddler.com/
A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
51–60 of 92 posts
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#52It's cool. But it's missing the 411/305Hz sawtooth. Last year I tried to setup my vim to play these beeps in normal/edit modes and on some key presses. It was quite fun but I wasn't able to play a long lasting sound like in the demo.
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#53Author here if there are any questions...
Are there any opportunities for the local community to help preserve this history?
There’s a new development planned for the SRI site and I was hoping there’d be some honorary for that hallowed ground.
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#54I urge you to consider using an RC network with a hex inverter to debounce your switch input without resorting to a 100ms delay. I've wasted enough hours to know that the best kind of software debounce is a few resistors and capacitors.
https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/d...
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#55Author here if there are any questions...
Are there any opportunities for the local community to help preserve this history? There’s a new development planned for the SRI site and I was hoping there’d be some honorary for that hallowed ground.
Christina Engelbart is working to preserve the history at the Doug Engelbart Institute: https://www.dougengelbart.org/
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#56Fascinating 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 boo…
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 a…
> 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.
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#57Author here if there are any questions...
Hey, great to see this, thank you so much, Ken! I'm lucky to own an original Engelbart mouse and chord keyset too, and I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them, making 3d printable models, and embedding metal and electronic parts so they work via bluetooth! The first step is to take it apart, measure and weigh the pieces, 3d scan it, and make a realistic 3d printable all plastic model (like an easy-to-print…
Hi Don. I think this stuff is great, and applaud your work, so don’t think of this as a slight (depending on the answer, of course): how practical is this? Again, if the answer is approximately “not at all practical”, that’s fair, but I guess I could also see it fitting somewhere on a spectrum like emacs vs vi, QWERTY vs Dvorak, etc…
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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.
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.
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#59I urge you to consider using an RC network with a hex inverter to debounce your switch input without resorting to a 100ms delay. I've wasted enough hours to know that the best kind of software debounce is a few resistors and capacitors. https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/d...
I feel like the diode in this schematic is the wrong way around for a normally open switch: it speeds up the keyrelease event when the switch opens instead of the keypress event when it closes.
But I think the 100ms delay Ken mentions was intended for a different purpose: to wait for all the fingers in the character to be detected. I think a much better approach would be to wait for one of the keys to be released before registering a character. Isn't that what Engelbart did? I suspect this timing-based approach explains why Ken found it so difficult to use.
As I understand it, Baudot's original chording keyboard instead mechanically locked the keys down until the character was transmitted over the telegraph line. The telegrapher had time to enter his next character while the system was transmitting the characters of his colleagues, interleaved with his own at a fixed baud rate.
Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset
#60Obligatory mention of the Plover stenography engine: https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/
So far most boards seem to be made in the US. Anyone making them in Europe or elsewhere?