In the beginning was the command line, and it pretty much sucked. Ever try to play DOOM on greenbar paper? But even the CLI (command line interface) has deep roots. As Carl Sagan points out in Cosmos, the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle have design considerations that go all the way back to the origins of the rail system and beyond; in just the same way, our QWERTY keyboards are an artifact from the first days of the mechanical typewriter. Bent or straight, that familiar array of letters, on which every letter you see here was banged out, is a direct descendant from the days when little metal things would smack a sheet of paper, and this pattern simply kept them from getting stuck too often.

So, here in 2009, we're all out here imitating the input strings of nineteenth-century teletypes on key patterns defined by nineteenth-century mechanical shortcomings. Sometimes, learning how the sausage is made is pretty cool. BI is not certain this is one of those times, but there it is.

A few of you are probably out there smirking over your DVORAKs right now, gloating at your faster typing speed and lower incidence of RSI. Particularly well-heeled readers may be toggling back and forth between these two configurations, or inventing their own layouts on one of these. Semi-programmable gaming keyboards have gained a fair number of adherents and advocates, especially for games that can benefit from hotkeys being near to hand. It's entirely possible that some of you might have three hands, or an aversion to banging on keys altogether. BI isn't going to judge your choice of text-input doohickey. Be amused and entertained, probably, but not judge.

But that's only half of the input equation (or a bit more, to the endless chagrin of folks who deride keyboard turners). The other half is whatever we use to wave our cursor around.

Hey, you in the back... we didn't mean that literally. This is a family show.

Oh. Sorry, Mr. Reubens.

Ahem. For the majority of folks, this is done with some flavor of mouse. This is where the Apple folks have the right to gloat, because they brought the mouse into the consumer space. IBM, for whatever reason, didn't think they'd be popular or useful for their business machines prior to the original Mac proving them so very, very wrong. For gamers, the advent of USB and the attendant shift to optical motion tracking has been a tremendous boon in terms of speed and accuracy. High-precision mousing is also the purview of graphics designers, artists, and schematics tinkerers. Some folks prefer a variant of the trackball -- BI's former boss among them, with a model that sported a huge rotating orb that could be moved with fingertips or thumb -- possibly due to finer finer motion control, or a deep-seated love of Centipede.

Even in the gaming-controller arena, we've recently seen a revolution in input devices beyond mere buttons and joysticks or D-pads, to the chagrin of some and the delight of others. Foot-pads, guitars, drums, whatever you want to consider the Wiimote to be, and the behemoth that Steel Battalion came with. And then there is the augmented functionality of force feedback to conventional controllers and steering controls (wheel or flight stick) that blur the line between input and output even further.

BI's preference is for "conventional" ergo boards and the Trackman Wheel. The former is for comfort, the latter is due to three years with a desk too small to put a monitor, keyboard and mouse on it at the same time, so the input devices ended up deployed on our lap and the arm of our chair, respectively. If nothing else, there is one substantial fringe benefit from using strange input devices -- almost nobody wants to jump on our office PC to bang out a quick email.


Rafe Brox spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Wheel. Those of you wishing to inflict or solicit hardware and gaming geekery in person can catch him volunteering at Dragon*Con. If you also share an unhealthy passion for PC hardware or know a good place he can get help for this addiction, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.