There are others that never made it out of the research labs, or that have come and gone. Three that I know of are:


* IBM Cambridge (MA) chord keyboard for the IBM 3270 display terminal by Nathaniel Rochester. Had left and right hand keyboards and one could type with either or both at the same time. A number were released around in IBM in the late 1970's.

I still have a left-handed keyboard but the remainder of the system was 'loaned' and never returned. It had a 3x5 keyboard (if I'm remembering it correctly) and chords were formed by pressing multiple keys with the four ingers. There was a separate 1x4(?) thumb chord keyboard for shifting, blank, and other stuff. Each key had multiple letters on it, and keys had dimples at their corners so that the intersection of four keys could be pressed at one time.

* Doug Englebart's very simple chord keyboard with five 'piano' keys giving 31 possible keystrokes. (Think a moment and you'll see why not 32.) It was used in his NLS system for years, and was a part of a then famous demo at a Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1969 or so! I think that was the first time that anyone was seen in public using a mouse, and the first time that a demo was run from two locations (40 miles apart with video). This is definitely before my time, though I've used Doug's mouse and keyboard in later incantations.


* A no-key stroke chord input device by a researcher at the university of Texas had a stylus and a layout of conductive circles each marked with one letter. They layout was based on English letter frequencies (including digraphs and trigraphs) so that common words and word parts were one stroke. There was a paper on it in IEEE Computer about 1983 (+-2). This one gets reinvented every few years.


I once had Rochester's keyboard hooked up and sitting there, right there, staring at me, for several years. Somehow the only time I ever really tried it was when the regular keyboard broke and it was all I had. It still didn't take.

No one but the inventors seemed to use them. Even a one handed system programmer just down the hall from the inventors preferred a regular keyboard.

So, go figure! Inventors love to invent the things, and users never quite get around to using them.

Dave

BTW, does anyone know of any others?

Uh, we talked at one point of just using a regular keyboard and intercepting it at a very low level where we could catch each key go down or up. Pick five keys, say Space-J-I-O-; (semicolon key) that fit nicely to ones hand and do an Englebart-like chord keyboard. I don't think it's impossible to do a chord keyboard on a regular keyboard.

At 13:56 -0700 2/23/2000, Ken G. Brown wrote:
>I've often thought that chording keyboards <http://www.tifaq.org/keyboards/chording-keyboards.html>, such as the Bat <http://www.infogrip.com/> made much more sense than either Querty or Dvorak, particularly since they can allow typing all the characters with either hand.
>
>   Ken
>
>At 9:21 AM -0500 on 2/23/00,  Warren Postma is rumored to have written:
>
>> >It's a different way of arranging the keys on a typewriter (or computer)
>>>keyboard.  The familiar QWERTY layout was developed early in the days of
>>>manual typewriters, and was specifically intended to slow typists down by
>>>placing common key sequences together.
>>
>>"The story of Dvorak's superiority is a myth or, perhaps more properly, a
>>hoax."
>>
>>See http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/dvorak.html
>>
>>Warren

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David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
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