Text File

Aucb.620 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Sat Mar 6 09:39:09 1982 Montgomery Keyboard >From LAWS@SRI-AI Thu Mar 4 16:49:45 1982 The March '82 issue of the IEEE Computer magazine has an article about keyboard designs, particularly the Montgomery wipe-activated keyboard.

The author (Edward B. Montgomery, U. Texas Health Science Center at Dallas) uses word and trigram frequencies to establish that the number of wipes required to enter words of English text is about half the number of ordinary keystrokes. He gives no indication of the average time per multicharacter wipe as opposed to that for a keystroke (a fact which I find suspicious). He also omits the space at the end of each word, a serious omission which biases the comparison in his favor.

The chief advantage that I see for the wipe keyboard is that the most common words (the, of, and, to, a, in, is, he, if) can be entered as single wipes. (He also counts I, ignoring shifts.) These words account for about a quarter of all English words, but not a quarter of all keystrokes. Touch typists already rattle these off as single units, but a new keyboard might offer such common words as additional keys if a speedup could be shown.

One more thing bothers me about the Montgomery keyboard. The design is based on digram and trigram statistics rather than syllable statistics. It would be interesting to see how far one could go in designing a keyboard for which each syllable was a single key or wipe.

A syllable keyboard, or to some extent the Montgomery keyboard, could also benefit from on-board intelligence to insert word spaces automatically. The user would initiate auto-space mode, and then enter a stream of syllables. The keyboard unit would use a simple grammer to segment this stream into words and would insert the spaces accordingly. The user would need a "don't space" key to override this mechanism, but override strokes should be much fewer than current space strokes. (Note that the technology required is similar to, but simpler than, that required for connected speech recognition and automated transcribing machines.)

-- Ken Laws -------

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.