🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <88Dec26.153341est.10798@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>, bradb@ai (Brad Brown) writes:
>Whether the IR keyboard really worked on the PC-Jr is debatable -- it *was*
>a cool idea but required a line-of-sight from the keyboard to the computer.
>This was *not* nice.  If you could put the IR reciever on the NeXT monitor
>it would be OK, but then you'd still have to worry about paper getting in the 
>way or the desk covering the LED when you type on your lap.  Give me a nice
>old wire, just make it long and flexible!

This just means that the IR transmitter was anemic.  A really *bright* IR
source can bounce off walls, ceilings, etc. to get to the sensor. Think of
flashing a strobe light in a dark room.  Steve Wozniak's CL9's "Tyron"
remote control booster is an example. Obviously this makes crosstalk
between two systems in the same room even worse, but at the cost of a little
more processing power in the keyboard, one could do a packet-based scheme
(like Ethernet) to address the keyboard packets and get retransmission after
a collision.

--
Rich McAllister (rfm@sun.com)