Anyone using alternative input devices with Squeak?

Alan Kay alank at wdi.disney.com
Sat Nov 7 16:26:17 UTC 1998


Carl --

I don't know where the Newton OS 2.0 recognizer came from (or anything
about it).

I don't think anything makes GRAIL unique except that it was the first
really good and comprehensive all-pen-based GUI. RAND invented the tablet
(in 1964) in order to do such an interface. The recognizer was done in '66
by Gabe Groner, and fit into 2k words of the single user 360/44 that was
used as the host machine. Their basic notion was that whatever a UI does,
it should do it essentially perfectly, because it is so jarring to have
something that is supposed to feel like a transparent extension of one's
body constantly stop the action with errors. So they opted for a recognizer
that the user would have to learn -- and eventually decided to try to do
everything with single strokes for speed. The result was really great, and
the totality of human factors was better than grafitti on the palm pilot.

The one I did that is now in Squeak comes from a long line of recognizers
that go all the way back to GRAIL. It is only a page of Squeak code, and
you can see that the GRAIL approach was quite elegant and simple.

Cheers,

Alan

-------

At 3:19 PM -0000 11/7/98, Carl E Gundel wrote:
>On Sat, 7 Nov 1998, Alan Kay wrote:
>> In the early Dynabook design, Engelbart's idea was adapted to a pen-based
>> interface. RAND had done GRAIL, a really great pen-based system with a
>> recognizer similar in spirit to and better than Grafitti. We realized from
>> experience with Engelbart that even a perfect recognizer (which GRAIL
>> almost was) was still too slow for some interactions, so I put a keyboard
>> on the Dynabook model. Again the scheme was to navigate, give commands, fix
>> typos, and do short text inputs with the pen, and then to switch to the
>> keyboard for intensive text entry.
>>
>> This scheme was argued for the Newton and rejected (not on logical grounds).
>
>Alan,
>
>What makes GRAIL unique?  I understand that the Newton OS 2.0 does come
>with a character by character recognizer.  Do you know where this came
>from.  I read someplace on the web that is was from Xerox.
>
>Carl
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> Carl Gundel  carlg at world.std.com  Shoptalk Systems  508-872-5315
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