Aucb.607
fa.editor-p
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Fri Mar 5 16:52:33 1982
Montgomery Keyboard
>From LAWS@SRI-AI Thu Mar 4 12:06:58 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
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