Keys to change

It was 1968 when Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced HAL 9000 - the computer that “never made an error”. It also didn’t need a keyboard, interacting instead with humans through voice and video.

Keyboards, already in wide use then, have become ubiquitous in the internet age. And with Internet World Stats estimating that 1.35 billion humans are online (and about 3.3 billion have access to a mobile phone), it seems that in the digital age humans have replaced hunting and gathering with tapping and pecking.

Although there are many ways to enter data into a PC, the keyboard is still the one most widely used. But contenders such as touch, speech and handwriting recognition are closing the gap.

Read it all here.

Published on June 06, 2008

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