The half keyboard
You’re new to computers. You sit down in front of one for the first time, and quickly you realize that operating this thing won’t be easy. Your steering wheel is a keyboard with so many more keys than you have fingers! Luckily, a company called Matias created the appropriately named “HalfKeyboard,” which is essentially a keyboard sliced in half with the missing keys accessible when you hold down the spacebar.
The HalfKeyboard was actually created so you could leave your other hand free while typing with one hand. This way, you could, say, fix typos with one hand while navigating through a document with the other. No need to move your hands back and forth from keyboard to mouse. It was also targeted at those with physical disabilities as well PDA owners who could type while texting, though the thought makes me nauseous. One-handed keyboards exist today but they are almost exclusively meant for gamers.
Here is what we wrote about the HalfKeyboard in 2002:
They claim people can type up to 64 words per minute with these. Aimed mainly at PDA users, but I suspect they’re going to have a lot of trouble convincing people this is a good idea, no matter how easy to use they actually are.
