Home Automation EZine
Volume 2 Issue 6
December 1997

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Tomorrow’s Child
By Ken Sinclair
Enviromation Services Inc

"Can you believe that the computer industry has evolved to its present state by teaching grown humanoids to type on obscurely arranged keyboards. Actually not all of them, myself included, ever really learned how to type, and there are a lot of frustrated hunt and peck people out there."


Ken is President of Enviromation
Services Inc a virtual company
that's goal is to Automate your
Environment .

sinclair@enviromation.bc.ca
www.enviromation.bc.ca


Will tomorrow's child evolve with a technological tail to interface with computers?

Will medical science replace the umbilical cord with a multi-pin plug?

Will bio-mechanics find a way to capture our eye movements in a pointing and clicking motion?

Whatever the breakthrough for human interface to these infernal machines, would it please hurry!

Can you believe that the computer industry has evolved to its present state by teaching grown humanoids to type on obscurely arranged keyboards. Actually not all of them, myself included, ever really learned how to type, and there are a lot of frustrated hunt and peck people out there.

Next the mouse came to reduce our typing load, that annoying little device that always hits your coffee cup or runs off its pad before it ever gets close to the desired screen location. If this device is not annoying enough it has evolved to be the bottom end of a broken joy stick hidden in the middle of that original obscure keyboard on your new laptop. Have you ever tried to really use one of these things? and they call it a thinkpad. Why can't I just think instead of gliding over pads, tapping my fingers, rolling balls, writing on x y pads. Scream!!!!

Speech interface is coming with many mega hertz machines, but I think it too will have severe restrictions and drawbacks as we will have to learn to speak with a Billy Gates accent - and a cough could clear your hard drive.

Maybe I'm just grouchy, but is there a better way??