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Date:      Thu, 18 Jul 1996 09:53:39 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de>
Cc:        FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD keyboard
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.95.960718091936.2589A-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199607180826.KAA25055@allegro.lemis.de>

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On Thu, 18 Jul 1996, Greg Lehey wrote:

> > It takes more than a day to settle into it.
> 
> I could believe that :-(  My real question is, why bother?

If after a long day of typing, your hands, wrists and/or arms are
sore in any way, you could be causing permanent dammage to
yourself, even if the pain is quite subtle.  After many years,
you may completely loose your ability to type.  I'm not making
this up, it really happens to people.  

For me, switching from a regular keyboard to the MS keyboard was
awkward for awhile, but not painful.  Going back to a regular
keyboard now is awkward, *and* painful.  I doubt it is any more
painful than using it was before, but now that I've typed on
something else that doesn't hurt, I really notice it.  Its the
old notion of not noticing the air until there isn't any of it.
Alternate analogy: bad habbits are hard to break, even if you
know they are bad.

Given the huge losses that companies swallow in RSI treatment and
lost work time caused by poor keyboard design, I find it hard to
believe that there are so *few* alternative keyboards on the
market.  The MS one is the first affordable one, but since people
differ in their geometry, its fixed geometry is less than ideal. 
Also, people who like the noisy IBM key action won't like it that
much. 

> > I guess you have a different geometry.  :-)  
> 
> It's more like my chair.  In fact, looking at the way I sit, I *do*
> have my arms inclined at about 15°, 

Of course, you have to have them inclined because your shoulders
are wider than where your hands have to be.  Thats not the big
problem with regular keyboards.  The problem is you have to bend
your wrists outward in a less than natural position to align your
fingers on the home row of a regular keyboard: 

      | |          /  \
     /  \         /    \
    /    \       /      \

   regular       microsoft

For more information on typing injuries and alternate keyboards,
look at:

  http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dwallach/tifaq/


-john

== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================




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