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Curiosity will hopefully not kill the cat

From: "Thor Harald Johansen" <>
Date: Sat, 22 May 1999 11:37:17 +0200

Hi!

I saw this TV program about wearable computers, and I got interested. A time
after I saw it, I decided to build a hand-held keyboard. I found out about
some signal pins on the paralell port, and I thought: "Why can't I just run
one of the output pins through five keys from a broken keyboard, and back to
those signal pins, then code a program to read'em?". Well, I did so, without
any real good equipment. The "paddle" was created with a aliminium foil
core, a roll of tape, five key switches, a soldering iron, and a few wires
from a Nintendo paddle I had lying around. I was able to write things with
the keyboard, using binary combinations, where one finger was one bit, but
the human anatomy makes it difficult to do certain combinations, so the
project was technically successful, but not practically.

Some time later I had forgotten all about my little "invention", when I read
an article about new user interfaces, and that desktop environments may not
be future of computers. The article was interesting, and I found a few links
to MIT pages about wearables, and I got my interest back. I've been
searching around the net for more information, but it seems that most of it
is outdated. I've heard about PC/104, WearComp ++, but I'm unsure of a few
things:

1. How much will it cost to build a wearable?
2. What kind of display gives a good compromise between cost and resolution?
3. What's the most common input device for wearables, and how does it work?
4. Aren't hard drives kind of ... expensive? ;)

Well, that's all I have to ask for this time. I hope someone will be able to
answer. :)
--
Thor Harald Johansen


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