Douglas Engelbart presented his ideas to the public in one long demo session on December 9, 1968. This demo is known today as "The Mother of All Demos."
If you watch the Mother of All Demos - which you should - you will notice the piano-like device sitting to the left of the conventional keyboard:
The above gadget is known as a chorded keyboard, or chorder. In Engelbart's computing environment, it supplemented, rather than replaced, the traditional typewriter keyboard.
At first glance, this device resembles the familiar stenotype. Cy Endfield's Microwriter was something rather different: a genuinely-original, alphabet-based, general-purpose text entry system.
The Microwriter's use of one - rather than both - hands seems like a shortcoming, until you realize that the device was designed for maximal portability - at the very dawn of the age of personal computing! It was really intended to replace a traditional paper clipboard, rather than a typewriter:
For people on the move
For a person whose job involves moving from place to place, the Microwriter is an ideal way of recording notes of interviews, inspections or orders - or preparing a report as he goes along.
The contents of the memory can then be printed out on returning to the office. Or the material can be transferred on to a micro-cassette and posted back to the office where it can be printed out.
images of people using the Microwriter
on a construction site
at a desk
in the backseat of a car
In Alan Kay's metaphor, the problem with bootstrapping in Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center was that while " #Engelbart, for better or for worse, was trying to make a violin,
most people don't want to learn the violin."
www.loper-os.org?p=861