However, stenographers typically train for three years before reaching professional levels of speed and accuracy. ==History== The earliest known chord keyboard was part of the "five-needle" telegraph operator station, designed by Wheatstone and Cooke in 1836, in which any two of the five needles could point left or right to indicate letters on a grid.
It was designed to be used by untrained operators (who would determine which keys to press by looking at the grid), and was not used where trained telegraph operators were available. The first widespread use of a chord keyboard was in the stenotype machine used by court reporters, which was invented in 1868 and is still in use.
The output of the stenotype was originally a phonetic code that had to be transcribed later (usually by the same operator who produced the original output), rather than arbitrary text—automatic conversion software is now commonplace. In 1874, the five-bit Baudot telegraph code and a matching 5-key chord keyboard was designed to be used with the operator forming the codes manually.
In 1892, Frank Haven Hall, superintendent of the Illinois Institute for the Education of the Blind, created the Hall Braille Writer, which was like a typewriter with 6 keys, one for each dot in a braille cell.
The Perkins Brailler, first manufactured in 1951, uses a 6-key chord keyboard (plus a spacebar) to produce braille output, and has been very successful as a mass market affordable product.
In 1954, an important concept was discovered: chordic production is easier to master when the production is done at the release of the keys instead of when they are pressed. Researchers at IBM investigated chord keyboards for both typewriters and computer data entry as early as 1959, with the idea that it might be faster than touch-typing if some chords were used to enter whole words or parts of words.
In 1954, an important concept was discovered: chordic production is easier to master when the production is done at the release of the keys instead of when they are pressed. Researchers at IBM investigated chord keyboards for both typewriters and computer data entry as early as 1959, with the idea that it might be faster than touch-typing if some chords were used to enter whole words or parts of words.
Proc., Vol 33, 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, p395-410 Lockhead and Klemmer, An Evaluation of an 8-Key Word-Writing Typewriter, IBM Research Report RC-180, IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, Nov 1959. Rochester, Bequaert, and Sharp, "The Chord Keyboard", IEEE Computer, December 1978, p57-63 Seibel, "Data Entry Devices and Procedures", in Human Engineering Guide to Equipment Design, Van Cott and Kinkade (Eds), 1963 Computer keyboard types Physical ergonomics
Their results were inconclusive, but research continued until at least 1978. Doug Engelbart began experimenting with keysets to use with the mouse in the mid 1960s.
Proc., Vol 33, 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, p395-410 Lockhead and Klemmer, An Evaluation of an 8-Key Word-Writing Typewriter, IBM Research Report RC-180, IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, Nov 1959. Rochester, Bequaert, and Sharp, "The Chord Keyboard", IEEE Computer, December 1978, p57-63 Seibel, "Data Entry Devices and Procedures", in Human Engineering Guide to Equipment Design, Van Cott and Kinkade (Eds), 1963 Computer keyboard types Physical ergonomics
Douglas Engelbart introduced the chorded keyset as a computer interface in 1968 at what is often called "The Mother of All Demos". ==Principles of operation== Each key is mapped to a number and then can be mapped to a corresponding letter or command.
In a famous 1968 demonstration, Engelbart introduced a computer human interface that included the QWERTY keyboard, a three button mouse, and a five key keyset.
Proc., Vol 33, 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, p395-410 Lockhead and Klemmer, An Evaluation of an 8-Key Word-Writing Typewriter, IBM Research Report RC-180, IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, Nov 1959. Rochester, Bequaert, and Sharp, "The Chord Keyboard", IEEE Computer, December 1978, p57-63 Seibel, "Data Entry Devices and Procedures", in Human Engineering Guide to Equipment Design, Van Cott and Kinkade (Eds), 1963 Computer keyboard types Physical ergonomics
In the 1970s the funding Engelbart's group received from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was cut and many key members of Engelbart's team went to work for Xerox PARC where they continued to experiment with the mouse and keyset.
It is implemented on two popular mobile phones, each provided with software disambiguation, which allows users to avoid using the space-bar. "Multiambic" keyers for use with wearable computers were invented in Canada in the 1970s.
A 1975 design by IBM Fellow Nat Rochester had 14 keys that were dimpled on the edges as well as the top, so one finger could press two adjacent keys for additional combinations.
Their results were inconclusive, but research continued until at least 1978. Doug Engelbart began experimenting with keysets to use with the mouse in the mid 1960s.
The most common letters do not necessarily require chording as is the case with the GKOS keyboard optimised layouts (Android app) where the twelve most frequent characters only require single keys. ===Historical=== The WriteHander, a 12-key chord keyboard from NewO Company, appeared in 1978 issues of ROM Magazine, an early microcomputer applications magazine. Another early commercial model was the six-button Microwriter, designed by Cy Endfield and Chris Rainey, and first sold in 1980.
Proc., Vol 33, 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, p395-410 Lockhead and Klemmer, An Evaluation of an 8-Key Word-Writing Typewriter, IBM Research Report RC-180, IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, Nov 1959. Rochester, Bequaert, and Sharp, "The Chord Keyboard", IEEE Computer, December 1978, p57-63 Seibel, "Data Entry Devices and Procedures", in Human Engineering Guide to Equipment Design, Van Cott and Kinkade (Eds), 1963 Computer keyboard types Physical ergonomics
These portable devices first became popular with the wearable computer movement in the 1980s. Thad Starner from Georgia Institute of Technology and others published numerous studies showing that two-handed chorded text entry was faster and yielded fewer errors than on a QWERTY keyboard.
Keychord sets were used at Xerox PARC in the early 1980s, along with mice, GUIs, on the Xerox Star and Alto workstations.
A one button version of the mouse was incorporated into the Apple Macintosh but Steve Jobs decided against incorporating the chorded keyset. In the early 1980s, Philips Research labs at Redhill, Surrey did a brief study into small, cheap keyboards for entering text on a telephone.
The most common letters do not necessarily require chording as is the case with the GKOS keyboard optimised layouts (Android app) where the twelve most frequent characters only require single keys. ===Historical=== The WriteHander, a 12-key chord keyboard from NewO Company, appeared in 1978 issues of ROM Magazine, an early microcomputer applications magazine. Another early commercial model was the six-button Microwriter, designed by Cy Endfield and Chris Rainey, and first sold in 1980.
It was designed only for right-handed use. In 1982 the Octima 8 keys cord keyboard was presented by Ergoplic Kebords Ltd an Israeli Startup that was founded by Israeli researcher with intensive experience in Man Machine Interface design.
It was multi-lingual supporting English, German, French and Hebrew. The BAT is a 7-key hand-sized device from Infogrip, and has been sold since 1985.
It was originally introduced in the early 1990s by Handykey and is currently being produced by Tek Gear (Tek Gear acquired Handykey on April 30, 2008).
Macro keys, and multiple modes are also easily implemented with a user space driver. ==Commercial devices== One minimal chordic keyboard example is Edgar Matias' Half-Qwerty keyboard described in patent circa 1992 that produces the letters of the missing half when the user simultaneously presses the space bar along with the mirror key.
CyKey (pronounced sai-ki) is named after the Microwriter chord system's co-inventor Cy Endfield, who died in 1995 but the name also reflects its intuitive nature. ====SiWriter==== The SiWriter is an app for the iPad and iPhone which uses a close variant of the microwriter chording system developed by Cy Enfield.
That solution is still alive and proposed by Fastap and Unitap among others, and a commercial phone has been produced and promoted in Canada during 2006. ==Standards== Historically, the baudot and braille keyboards were standardized to some extent, but they are unable to replicate the full character set of a modern keyboard.
It was originally introduced in the early 1990s by Handykey and is currently being produced by Tek Gear (Tek Gear acquired Handykey on April 30, 2008).
A video game controller called the X-SKIN, using this system, was expected to be commercially available by 2010 to help make Morphs popular on console systems and ease entry of common data such as a username and password, but the USB device was never made commercially available.
The efficiency gained by using multi-character chords have novice Twiddler users typing at 47 WPM while experts can burst up to 130 WPM. ====ASETNIOP==== ASETNIOP is a virtual keyboard based on chords that appeared in 2012.
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