🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <696@hrc63.uucp> paj@hrc63.uucp (Mr P Johnson "Baddow") writes:
>
>About five or six years ago there was a gizmo on the market called the
>"MicroWriter".  It had a one line 22 segment led display and a well designed
>chord keyboard.... [ stuff deleted ]

  The MicroWriter was (is?) a chord-keyboard device merely by accident;
  it was designed to be an electronic note-book, to be held in one hand
  and operated with the other.  I have a vague recollection of there being
  2 unidextrous versions of it - left and righthanded.  Its weakest point
  was probably too few keys that made it impossible to use full character
  set including the interpunction marks, lower AND upper case in an uniform
  manner.  The 65 possible characters (there were 4 keys for each of the
  main digits and 2 for the thumb; the latter, when pressed together gave
  the extra code) possible with chord-pressing (as opposed to a sequence of
  escape-code plus one or more [chord] characters) were just not enough
  to generate all of the alpha characters (52 in English), the 10 digits,
  interpunction (some 6 to 8 chars) and another 6 - 9 MicroWriter-control
  codes for scrolloing the text back and forth across the one 16-character-
  line display.

  BTW: the "MicroWriter" for the BBC Micro used the same physical hardware
  though stripped to the bare-bones with no the display nor any internal
  character-decoding firmware; the software supplied with it made it
  possible to change the meaning of individual chords/ sequences by
  selective binding of incoming chord-codes to chosen ASCII codes
  (via a RAM-resident table) thus extending its usefulness somewhat.

>The device was a commercial flop.  It was intended for notes and stuff, but
>the keyboard need[ed] learning... [ stuff deleted ]

  It may have been a commercial flop, it was also held in esteem by its
  highly dedicated users.  The company (owned by an individual by the name
  of Cy Enfield) made plenty of money selling it for GBP 1700 apiece
  to various travelling salesmen & the like at a time when the nearest
  (and only!) portable writing apparatus was the Osborne 1 that weighted
  20+ kg and required a power supply.

>Could the MicroWriter concept
>be about to come of age?  Two things we need:
>
>On-line help for chords and sequences.
>
>A chord system that becomes useful after a couple of hours
>practice (no more).

  Actually - that's where MicroWriter failed - by having tried to implement
  a one-handed chord system using "visually mnemonic" key layout.  It never
  worked.  They'd have been better off with a chord system that built on
  the frequency of characters in the English language - so that the most
  frequent letters like 'e', 't' and 'shrldu' would be generated by the
  single digits (fingers) and so on... making the learnig curve less steep.

>Paul Johnson
>GEC-Marconi Research
>The company has put a radio inside my head: it controls everything I say!
                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  I want one too!
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