Special keyboard

1994/05/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Teknologia

The dream of typing secretaries is to listen to what is said in meetings or conferences and transcribe everything by machine. However, those who today machine texts, despite their quick work, circulate at a maximum speed of 300-400 characters per minute. That's about the amount you've read from the beginning of this article right here. To speed up this speed a new keyboard called "Velotype" has been invented, very different from the usual.

This new keyboard is replaced by the traditional one of any computer (both PC and Macintosh) by a very simple to install. Just disconnect the old keyboard and connect the new one in the same place.

The operating basis of the new keyboard is simple. The problem is to replace the letter (a character) with the full letter of the syllable. The pianist, instead of playing a single note at the same time, takes a chord on the piano and in this new keyboard we can think that the chords are complete syllables. Inside the syllable the keyboard "Velotype" itself places the characters in the right order thanks to its integrated computing. Therefore, words are separated into syllables and not into characters. Therefore, the writer must think of the syllable for the text to advance by groups of letters.

The keyboard is symmetrical and the keys are divided into three groups. In the central axis are the vowels, to the left the initial consonants of the syllable and to the right the final consonants. When the left, middle and right keys are played simultaneously, the "Velotype" keyboard recognizes the requested syllable.

This new system has been developed by a group of Dutch linguists and engineers and needs to be adapted to work in each language. It has been prepared for the main languages, recently adapted to French.

It is much more reliable than stenotipia or tachygraphy, since in this method there are usually not so many spelling errors. To become familiar with the new keyboard, the writer needs a minimum training of five days and then a speed of one thousand characters per minute can be reached. In other words, this article can be written in two minutes.