[RTTY] Point-and-click vs typing

[Tim Shoppa]

W4GKM writes:
> I just got in on this posting, what is the advantage of the Happy Hacker
keyboard?

For the most fervent keyboardists, never taking the hands off the home
position is important. Anything that involves moving hands over to arrow
keys or numeric keypad or mouse or (on many keyboards) to the function keys
introduces delays and reduces rate.

At same time, for someone who is not a fervent touch-typist, and prefers
hitting one of a big bank of function keys, or the arrow keys, or numeric
keypad keys, or prefers using the mouse, they could be at a disadvantage
with a simpler keyboard optimized for touch-typing.

I suspect only a tiny tiny fraction of population is fervent enough to go
for the Happy Hacker or similar keyboards. Certainly if (like most RTTY
users here) you spend a lot of time pointing and clicking on mouse and
prefer that over the keyboard, the Happy Hacker keyboard is probably not
the best thing!

I'm actually a little surprised at the responses to my impromptu survey.
When I started on RTTY 30+ years ago, mastery of the keyboard was pretty
important. (Not that they funky green-keys layout was by any means a
standard keyboard to begin with!). And today most of us hardly use the
keyboard at all!

Some classic green key layouts. I learned on a Model 32 but got to use the
Model 15 a few times. The happy hacker keyboard's minimal number of keys,
is the closest modern equivalent I know of to real green key layouts:

Model 15:
http://www.galleyrack.com/images/artifice/telegraphy/tty-stuff/cr-tty/tty-15-ksr-213102/intro/tty15-no2-9001-keyboard-top-clean-crop-2992x2412.jpg

Model 32:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Telex_machine_ASR-32.jpg

Tim N3QE