> From: "Roman Black" <fastvid@EZY.NET.AU>


> Imagine a wearable computer on your left forearm, with five
> "buttons" spaced for your five digits of your right hand.
>
> A basic binary system of 5bits gives you 32 key combinations,
> so enough for all the letters and some control codes. In using it
> you could "rap" your fingers up and down in the same spots and
> type one character per "rap". In real usage you would probably
> have two buttons for the thumb and two for the forefinger, giving
> more combinations etc.

There was a device that was almost exactly that which was briefly popular in
the 80's. It was called Microwriter. One application claimed for it was that
you could type with your hands in your pockets. The system was called
"chording" because you pressed more than one button at a time IIRC.

I dimly remember a diagram showing how the coding was supposedly designed
such that the key presses corresponded when possible to a skeleton outline
of the letter with the thumb as descender, though in practice this was about
as obvious as star constellations looking like animals or humans.


A quick search produced the following:

The original:

http://www.nifty.demon.co.uk/images/odd/mw/


Similar devices:

http://www.infogrip.com/bat.htm

http://web.mountain.net/~roair/wearjunk.html

ftp://sac-ftp.gratex.sk/sac/utilmisc/7key.zip

http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/cykey.htm#CyKey

http://www.datahand.com/


There was also an early PDA (more like a Casio databank really) called
AgendA which had an alpha keyboard and also Microwrite-type keys.

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads