What’s the weirdest piece of equipment you have owned or used?
Mine was definitely the “Datahand”, an ergonomic keyboard replacement where you place each hand on a contoured palm rest, and then a flower-shaped array of tiny switches around each fingertip could sense the slightest movement. placement of “keys” was mapped to QWERTY, so the slightest upward gesture of the left pinky would activate “q”, or a leftward movement of right right index finger would be an “h”. It was more intuitive than one might imagine.
I hoped to achieve higher typing speeds (I was already well over 100 words per minute), but after months of practice it was still an impairment. Eventually I admitted to myself that I only used it to cultivate an air of being eccentric, and soon after I dropped the pretense and switched back to normal keyboards.
The photo is my desk at One Technology, at the Cambridge office, while the company was still 5 employees in the basement of my house. We later grew into a commercial space .
Close-up photo sourced from internet:
Really “sci-fi” looking and not entirely friendly and inviting either lol
Hah! It was very unfriendly, no doubt about it. And I’d always get a chuckle if someone asked to “use my computer for just a sec”. The look of horror when they saw the lack of normal keyboard was… well, amusing to 27-year-old me.