From: gerard@stout.UUCP (Gerard van Draanen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: One-Hand Helds...
Summary: Developped kbd. for 1-handed entry some years ago
Date: 12 Nov 92 19:44:33 GMT
Reply-To: gerard@STOUT.UUCP (Gerard van Draanen)
Organization: Stork Bepak B.V., Utrecht, NL

In article <1992Nov12.074521.14888@primerd.prime.com> jasonp@sunbabe.Prime.COM (Jason Pascucci) writes:
>Is anybody doing/working on a single-handed data entry/retrieval system?

Did so, some years ago
>I envision something akin to a stenographer's typewriter,
>where you hold down N keys to get the desired effect.

In fact, what I did was to use
  4 fingers of the hand for 'lower nibble'
    thumb for selection/combination of 'higer nibble'

  Center of hand at 'Joystick' resting place.

With proper layout it's quite easy to use the keyboard, and are able
to use joystick at the same time.
I had it attached to my Apple II in those days.

Using of the Ascii character set simplifies things a lot as far as the
hardware etc is concerned. 
For those of us able to understand 'hexadecimal' it seems even logical, 
since 
  All capital letters in range  $40 .. $5A
    lowercase letters in range  $60 .. $7A
this requires only very slight movement of the thumb, together with
only vertical movment of the other fingers.

I was inspired enough to have it 'patent search'-ed, and the 
agency came up with only a few other possible solutions.

One is the 'Velotype' machine - for fast typists (I quess it replaces steno)
  this one became comercially available.

Another looks like a sort of 'Boxing glove' of fixed material, and has 
a fixed form, all kinds of switches inside etc... Didn't look like much
of a success to me.

Another was the now widely used 'Dynaglove' used in some video games, and
I guess some other applications as well... It was however never intended 
for data entry, more to track movement.


Anyways... It seemed that my 'Handy' keyboard, or 'Commander' would make
a possible succes..... I didn't persue it though......

I've been using it a while on my Apple, but decided that for speed-typing,
I would remain to be much quicker on my 'normal' keyboard.
In those days 'travelling computing' was not really a possibility for the
mass, so maybe it would have better changes these days.......Who knows

>And it should do all those things a personal reminder does, etc, 
>etc ad infinitum. And have a very readable screen.
>
>So? I'm making the assumption that this is completely a dream, 
>so ....

No logic, other than the keyboard (and some 'options') translation to
signals for the computer were included. It DID however have a
double 7-segment display, and some 3-color led's on it to show the
last character typed (in Hex).

Maybe... with todays technology (look at apple's newtron) it's quite
feaseble to make the kind of machine you would like.
With a lot of ideas here, however it's seldom the originality, but
the amount of time spent in selling the idea to someone that can DO
something with it.

===================   _____                  / ==============================
Gerard van Draanen.  /  _  _   _, __   _, __/  How come, after all books read
gerard@sbu.stork.nl /   / /-' /  /_/  /  /_/   You still can't go by the book
=================== ~~~~  `~ ~     ~ ~     ~   ==============================