A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

In the 1990s chorded keyboards were "popular" in regard to wearable computing. People like Steve Mann would give talks where he demonstrated how he could use his wearable computer (basically a laptop he strapped to himself with a clunky goggle-mounted display) that he controlled with a small chorded keyboard he operated with one hand. Obviously, a decade later with smartphones this looked pretty silly (if it didn't already in the 1990s) but some people really did think this was the future at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)

Back in the mid '80s our school was given a small number of Microwriter chorded keyboards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter) for our BBC Micro lab. Even as 12 year olds we were already crazy good touch-typists, so the Microwriter felt very clunky and unintuitive to us. I don't know what the lesson is from that. Just because it seems a good idea doesn't mean that it is. Or typewriter-style keyboards have survived over a century and a half for a reason.

I guess this was an inspiration for this character https://lain.wiki/wiki/Nezumi

Here is a great run down of that history:

https://computer.rip/2024-02-25-a-history-of-the-tty.html

Early versions had to be mechanically synced at the sending and receiving side. The typists had strict timings so the other end could receive it. This led to a version of punch cards that could be pre-typed and then fed in automatically, reducing the skill needed of the operator. The linage to teletypes were almost obvious.

Very good read, don't want to spoil too much.

Thank you for this, wonderful break down of some amazing history. I have watched that demo many many times in my pursuit of human computer interface thinking.

I often wondered what happened to this piece of hardware… I still hold a deep belief that our current input methods are flawed(as amazing as they are) and we are in need of another leap forward.

Anyway great read - thank you again.

How did Engelbart render black text on a white background during his 1968 Demo, considering that the display technology at the time was based on vector CRTs, which typically produced glowing light rather than dark areas?

I always drop everything to read when there are new articles. Keep up the great work Ken!

Hey, great to see this, thank you so much, Ken!

I'm lucky to own an original Engelbart mouse and chord keyset too, and I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them, making 3d printable models, and embedding metal and electronic parts so they work via bluetooth!

The first step is to take it apart, measure and weigh the pieces, 3d scan it, and make a realistic 3d printable all plastic model (like an easy-to-print toy), but then refine it to make a high quality hybrid version with the exact same weight and feel and materials and electronics using resin printing and off the shelf hardware like the wheel, so it feels as realistic as possible and actually works!

I think reproducing the actual weight and feel of the original is really important, the klunky feel of the wheel attached to the potentiometer hitting the rotation limit, how it scrapes across the table, etc. It's really amazing to hold and feel in your own hand, and it belongs in a hands-on museum like the Exploratorium, but it would quickly get destroyed. So it would be great if anyone who wants could 3d print their own quick and easy plastic replica, or assemble their own high quality functional replica too.

I want to release the simple model and detailed plans to make your own for free, and think it would be a great kit or pre-assembled gadget that the Computer History Museum could sell in the gift store.

It would also be cool to include an accelerometer and gyro in it so it would also work as a gestural game controller -- why not: it would be so cheap and easy to add!

Here are some parts I'm considering using, but I'm new to this stuff -- what do people with more experience think?

  Microcontroller: ESP32-S3 module (USB + Bluetooth capabilities)
  Motion Sensor: MPU6050 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope
  2× 10KΩ potentiometers for X/Y tracking wheels
  3× tactile buttons with pull-up resistors
  3.7V LiPo battery (350-500mAh)
  TP4056 charging module
  USB-C connector (for both charging and wired mode)

Are there any opportunities for the local community to help preserve this history?

There’s a new development planned for the SRI site and I was hoping there’d be some honorary for that hallowed ground.

Thanks for writing this!

You misspelled "eidophor".

Brad Neuberg (the founder of coworking) worked with Doug about 15 years ago to hook up one of these keysets to a then-current computer to use Augment. Any idea what happened to that work?

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chording keyboards are still extremely popular among the blind, after all, chording is how you type Braille. They appear on everything from mechanical Braillers of the 1950's[1], to modern, electronic Braille displays and notetakers. Input methods based on this concept and adapted for the touch screen are even built in to both iOS[2] and Android[3].

[1] https://wecapable.com/perkins-brailler-braille-typing/

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101637

[3] https://blog.google/products/android/braille-keyboard/

>[...] but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on.

I'm sad that he and others like Ted Nelson and Brett Victor would rightly say that his most important innovations have so far failed to catch on. But there's still time to raise awareness and make them real!

Ted Nelson's Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg

>Ted Nelson's emotional and moving eulogy for his friend Douglas Engelbart. Given at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, on December 9, 2013.

An Homage to Douglas Engelbart and a Critique of the State of Tech:

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/1...

>You don’t need me to tell you that Douglas Engelbart was one of the greatest men of all time. We gather today, in pretense of unanimity and concord, to croon over Doug’s ashes and grab for scraps of his robe.

>Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file, as he did.

>Some are no doubt here to cheer and march behind the mouse, as in the opening of the Mickey Mouse TV Club of yore. Let them be happy in that celebration.

>But the real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration.

>Don’t get me wrong, the people who gave us all those fonts were idealists too, in their way — they just didn’t necessarily hold a very high view of human potential.

>I used to have a high view of human potential. But no one ever had such a soaring view of human potential as Douglas Carl Engelbart — and he gave us wings to soar with him, though his mind flew on ahead, where few could see.

> Like Icarus, he tried to fly too far too fast, and the wings melted off. [...]

Doug and Karen Engelbart marry Marlene and Ted, May 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsKFbwLeS1k

>Poignant ceremony with sweet pledges, at the Marin Civic Center. Ann and Bill Duvall are co-celebrants. Underexposed and streaky, but the event is the important thing. (Battery ran out before the final verdict. Other camera was far away.)

A few words on Doug Engelbart:

https://worrydream.com/Engelbart/

>Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain.

>Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem. Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem, with technology falling out as part of a solution. When I read tech writers' interviews with Engelbart, I imagine these writers interviewing George Orwell, asking in-depth probing questions about his typewriter.

>Here's the most facile interpretation of Engelbart, splendidly exhibited by this New York Times headline:

>"Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88"

>This is as if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing the pencil. (This analogy may be more apt than any of us are comfortable with.)

>Then there's the shopping list interpretation:

>His system, called NLS, showed actual instances of, or precursors to, hypertext, shared screen collaboration, multiple windows, on-screen video teleconferencing, and the mouse as an input device.

>These are not true statements. [...]

Can you share some of the titles about computing in the 50-70s?

Even Emacs? Do say more...

I feel like the diode in this schematic is the wrong way around for a normally open switch: it speeds up the keyrelease event when the switch opens instead of the keypress event when it closes.

But I think the 100ms delay Ken mentions was intended for a different purpose: to wait for all the fingers in the character to be detected. I think a much better approach would be to wait for one of the keys to be released before registering a character. Isn't that what Engelbart did? I suspect this timing-based approach explains why Ken found it so difficult to use.

As I understand it, Baudot's original chording keyboard instead mechanically locked the keys down until the character was transmitted over the telegraph line. The telegrapher had time to enter his next character while the system was transmitting the characters of his colleagues, interleaved with his own at a fixed baud rate.

As Don Hopkins sort-of says—the original chording keyboard (and most later units) just had you inputting a binary number, which would be added to 64 to get an ASCII codepoint. No attempt was made to optimize for letter frequencies in English at this stage of design—A was one key (00001) but E was two (00101).

Engelbart's style of chording keyboard barely escaped the Anglosphere. But a related invention, the stenographic keyboard, did; these are used for court reporting and live television captioning. They introduce a very different strategy for inputting text—operators of these input one full syllable at a time, phonetically, and the machine interprets the pronunciation according to a dictionary; thus in English the most common errors are homophones, which can be revised later from context. It requires quite a lot of training and practice to be proficient with them, and they are extremely language-specific.

I would hazard a guess that it would make RSI worse because it minimizes the kinds of hand motions to operate it. Alleviate RSI with a keyboard by constantly changing the position of your hands on the keyboard - the exact opposite of touch typing dogma. Pecking at your keyboard is healthier.

Douglas Engelbart used a straightforward binary encoding scheme for the chord keyset:

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8

Engelbart: Think about if you took each finger, and wrote a one on this one, a two on this one, a four on this one, and a sixteen on this one. And every combination would lead clear up to sixty three.

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I, JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43454343

The commercially available "TapXR" input device also functions as a mouse and gestural pointing device! It's a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I haven't tried it yet though, but it looks really cool.

https://www.tapwithus.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdm8FcsKeoM

A WRISTBAND THAT REPLACES Your Keyboard, Mouse & Handheld Controller TapXR was designed to help humans adapt to the next generation of personal computing.

A Unified Way To Interact With Your PC, Smartphone, Tablet, SmartTV, Projector, VR, AR & XR

80+ Words Per Minute

Input up to 10 characters a second with just one hand or go even faster with two.

150+ Customizable Commands

Remap any finger combination into your favorite shortcuts, triggers, key-binds and commands

2500+ Tap Layouts

Enjoy thousands of user-created Language, Utility, Coding, Production & Gaming TapMaps - or make your own!

8 Hours of Battery Life

Get a full day of input on a single charge. Only 1 hour to recharge from zero to full!

----

My previous post about an earlier version from about 7 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17122717

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse!

https://www.tapwithus.com/

I've had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so you can look at the code to see how it works:

https://github.com/TapWithUs

Does this look legit? Has anybody tried it?

If it works as advertised, I'd love to develop TapPieMenus that you can use in VR, mobile, desktop computers, and everywhere else!

I'm excited about the possibility of creating easy to use, fast and reliable pie menus for Tap that users can fully customize, and use with one hand in the same way that Douglass Engelbart described you could do with two hands using a mouse and a chorded keyboard:

>"Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input. And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too. Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word. Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words. All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it."

It would be cool to have some tactile feedback, so the tutorial could train you to type out letters by vibrating your fingers with a piezo buzzer or something, and maybe it could even secretly spell out silent invisible messages to you while you were wearing it! And you could feel a different silent finger "ring tone" depending on who was calling you, then tap to answer to discard the call, or stroke with a TapPieMenu to send a canned reply.

enobrev on May 22, 2018 | parent | next [–]

LinusTechTips posted a decent review of the Tap a few weeks ago:

https://youtu.be/8za_4g5zCOM