It was by no means clear yet what a typewriter should be like or how it should be operated. In particular, it was by no means clear that touch typing had to be touch typing as we know it today, on a QWERTY keyboard. Many early typewriters in fact employed chord keysets. QWERTY keyboards , chord keysets, and, indeed, Morse telegraph keys all share an essential characteristic: the unlinking" of the hand, eye, and letter. In the different context of electronic computing fifty to one hundred years later, the performance advantages of the five-bit devices that Engelbart employed still existed.
As I eventually discovered, its value as an input device had been well recognized since the nineteenth century. Engelbart was able to ignore its subsequent eclipse and see how it could serve his purposes for user-machine communications in a way that what had become the standard, ubiquitous input device, the QWERTY keyboard , could not. It gave taste a purpose, a rationale beyond self-indulgence, an empathetic end.
Is it well balanced and justifiably likable? Is it a design that works? The intervening years have provided the answer. The opposite happened. Two-thumb typing on a touchscreen is now normal. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care about.
Greg Christie was right. Within a few days after making this change, I no longer had a pile of problems with no solutions in sight. You could type like a pirate. Even so, solving these lingering problems revealed the next issue, a subtle behavior about the new QWERTY keyboard and the space bar. From the start of my investigations into providing active dictionary assistance, I aimed my user interface and technical designs at helping people type individual words.
It worked something like the tumblers on a bike lock. This is a basic concept behind autocorrection, finding the best combination of letters given the taps from a typist, the keys that popped up, and considering the letters in the neighborhood of the popped-up key. Whereas a vocal minority of individuals in the Anglophone Latin-alphabetic world has been questioning the long-accepted sanctity of the QWERTY keyboard since the s, those outside of the Latin- alphabetic world have been critiquing QWERTY for nearly one hundred years longer.
