Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 17:01:56 +0200 (MET DST) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber) Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Chat) Subject: Re: FreeBSD keyboard Message-ID: <199607181501.RAA25499@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.95.960718091936.2589A-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> from "John Fieber" at Jul 18, 96 09:53:39 am
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John Fieber writes:
>
> 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.
I don't have a problem with that.
> 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.
Don't get me wrong, I've done a *lot* of thinking about ergonomics. I
don't suffer from RSI (yet), but my wife does, and seeing the
conditions under which she worked, I'm not surprised. My question,
which still hasn't been answered to my satisfaction, is: "Is the new,
funny-looking Microsoft keyboard ergonomic?". You say yes, and for
you it's obviously an improvement. My mileage may vary.
> 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 didn't have much of a problem with the keys themselves.
>>> 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
Sure. But that's not quite the truth: there's a large gap between the
two halves of the Microsoft keyboard, and that's what I'm complaining
about. It's more like:
| | / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
regular microsoft
That leaves your elbows further apart if you maintain the same angle.
> For more information on typing injuries and alternate keyboards,
> look at:
>
> http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dwallach/tifaq/
Reading the Web costs me an arm and a leg. Is this the FAQ that goes
through news.answers? I've read it some time ago. I agree with most
of it, but it didn't mention the Microsoft keyboard at the time.
One problem I have with the Microsoft keyboard is that it still has
straight rows of keys. I've done some experimentation, and I find
that curved rows would make more sense. Certainly, any keyboard that
has the keys I use frequently in difficult-to-access places is
subjectively not an ergonomic keyboard.
Greg
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