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A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

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Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#31

Post by jntun »

dfc wrote: post #22
jntun wrote: post #17

I've recently been reading lots of books about 50/60/70s computing & especially the San Francisco element of it, so I've been watching Engelbart's demo myself on and off for the last few weeks. It really is amazing being "close" to all this time of history, even if the only way we can interact with it is over USB nowadays! Tiniest footnote correction but not only were the desk & offices designed by Herman Miller; the…

Can you share some of the titles about computing in the 50-70s?

Of course!

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry [2005]

Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age [2000]

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date [1996]

Palo Alto [2023] (This is more for capturing the full scope of San Francisco / Palo Alto since the founding of California as a state)

Those are some off the top of my head right now being away from my library, probably also the most impactful to me in no specific order.

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#32

Post by rhet0rica »

jarpineh wrote: post #12

I sometimes wonder if chorded keyboard would be better for controlling the computer and keeping better posture against RSI issues. Not to mention more compact space compared to full keyboard. I seem to remember from a recording of the demo (and few writings on subject) that the keyset and mouse were used together for more powerful effect than either one alone. What I haven't found out is how well a multilingual write…

As Don Hopkins sort-of says—the original chording keyboard (and most later units) just had you inputting a binary number, which would be added to 64 to get an ASCII codepoint. No attempt was made to optimize for letter frequencies in English at this stage of design—A was one key (00001) but E was two (00101).

Engelbart's style of chording keyboard barely escaped the Anglosphere. But a related invention, the stenographic keyboard, did; these are used for court reporting and live television captioning. They introduce a very different strategy for inputting text—operators of these input one full syllable at a time, phonetically, and the machine interprets the pronunciation according to a dictionary; thus in English the most common errors are homophones, which can be revised later from context. It requires quite a lot of training and practice to be proficient with them, and they are extremely language-specific.

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#33

Post by pmcjones »

dfc wrote: post #22
jntun wrote: post #17

I've recently been reading lots of books about 50/60/70s computing & especially the San Francisco element of it, so I've been watching Engelbart's demo myself on and off for the last few weeks. It really is amazing being "close" to all this time of history, even if the only way we can interact with it is over USB nowadays! Tiniest footnote correction but not only were the desk & offices designed by Herman Miller; the…

Can you share some of the titles about computing in the 50-70s?

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Computing in the Middle Ages by Severo Ornstein - https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#34

Post by neilv »

> Engelbart's demo also featured an input device known as the keyset, but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on.

Chording keyboards were popular among the "wearable computing" researchers (who then went on to work on things like Google Glass). For example, the Twiddler.

One advantage of them is that you only need one hand to operate it.

And some designs mean you can simultaneously hold it with that same hand, without a steady surface.

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#35

Post by amoshebb »

Cpoll wrote: post #20
rwmj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

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?

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#36

Post by Animats »

The original chording keyboard was from Baudot, around 1897.[1] The original plan was for the sender to send 5-bit teletype characters with a 5-bit keyboard. This was deployed, not just a prototype.

[1] https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co33197...

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#38

Post by rwmj »

amoshebb wrote: post #35
Cpoll wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#39

Post by rwmj »

Cpoll wrote: post #20
rwmj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

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.

Yes, that's a really good point.

Re: A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

#40

Post by 6SixTy »

rhet0rica wrote: post #32
jarpineh wrote: post #12

I sometimes wonder if chorded keyboard would be better for controlling the computer and keeping better posture against RSI issues. Not to mention more compact space compared to full keyboard. I seem to remember from a recording of the demo (and few writings on subject) that the keyset and mouse were used together for more powerful effect than either one alone. What I haven't found out is how well a multilingual write…

As Don Hopkins sort-of says—the original chording keyboard (and most later units) just had you inputting a binary number, which would be added to 64 to get an ASCII codepoint. No attempt was made to optimize for letter frequencies in English at this stage of design—A was one key (00001) but E was two (00101). Engelbart's style of chording keyboard barely escaped the Anglosphere. But a related invention, the stenograp…

Braille typewriters are also very much like Stenography, except Braille is actually designed to replace reading & writing rather than transcribing speech.

Though Braille does use two dots for E and one for A, with mostly the same letter frequency in both it's native French and English.

Also very much surprised his keyboard didn't fit into either ASCII nor EBCDIC encoding. Granted, both of those barely existed at the time but still.

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