Engelbart's daughter, Christina Engelbart, loaned me a keyset, so I built a USB interface for it and plugged it into my laptop. I had a hard time using the keyset and I'm not surprised it didn't catch on. Supposedly it takes "only" a week to learn, too long for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpshKBKt_os

@kenshirriff i’ve looked at the keyset many times at the CHM

i’ve been turning the five buttons on the guitar hero guitar into a real instrument, so i think a lot about how i imagined the keyset would work

i honestly didn’t envision a 1:1 mapping with binary, that’s like qwerty being abcdef

i thought it would have been arranged by frequency of letters to ease of use, for example, vowels being the single key mappings, like:

10000 - a
01000 - e
00100 - i
00010 - o
00001 - u

anyways, thanks for sharing, i appreciate the deep dive

@kenshirriff I took some time to process the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and map it from more ergonomic to less ergonomic. i'll be publishing an app i'm calling "typing simulator" in the near future that makes "1 week" seem like nothing, once turned into rhythm based video game 🙃

const characterMapping = {
'00000': [' ', '.'],
'10101': ['?', '!'],
'11101': ['@', '#'],
'10111': [':', ';'],
'11111': ['<', '>'],
'10110': [',', '"'],

'10000': ['a', 'A'],
'01000': ['e', 'E'],
'00100': ['i', 'I'],
'00010': ['o', 'O'],
'00001': ['u', 'U'],

'11000': ['t', 'T'],
'01100': ['n', 'N'],
'00110': ['s', 'S'],
'00011': ['h', 'H'],
'10010': ['r', 'R'],
'01010': ['d', 'D'],
'00101': ['l', 'L'],
'10100': ['c', 'C'],
'01001': ['m', 'M'],
'11100': ['w', 'W'],
'01110': ['f', 'F'],
'00111': ['g', 'G'],
'10011': ['y', 'Y'],
'11010': ['p', 'P'],
'01101': ['b', 'B'],

'01011': ['v', 'V'],
'11001': ['k', 'K'],
'11110': ['j', 'J'],
'01111': ['x', 'X'],
'10001': ['q', 'Q'],
'11011': ['z', 'Z']
}