This idea was tried by the Engelbartians with chord keyboards integrated with 
the mouse mechanism. In their design, there wasn't enough stability to do 
positioning well (although one could imagine other technologies that would do 
both good pointing with both hands and allow all fingers to be used).

Cheers,

Alan




>________________________________
> From: Casey Ransberger <casey.obrie...@gmail.com>
>To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing 
><fonc@vpri.org> 
>Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 9:07 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
> 
>Below. 
>
>On Dec 16, 2011, at 3:19 PM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> And what Engelbart was upset about was that the "hands out -- hands 
>> together" style did not survive. The "hands out" had one hand with the 5 
>> finger keyboard and the other with the mouse and 3 buttons -- this allowed 
>> navigation and all commands and typing to be done really efficiently 
>> compared to today. "Hands together" on the regular keyboard only happened 
>> when you had bulk typing to do.
>
>Are you talking about the so-called "chording keyboard?"
>
>I had an idea years ago to have a pair of "twiddlers" (the one chording 
>keyboard I'd seen was called a twiddler) which tracked movement of both hands 
>over the desktop, basically giving you two pointing devices and a keyboarding 
>solution at the same time. 
>
>Now it's all trackpads and touch screens, and my idea seems almost Victorian:)
>
>
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