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At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born. Those innovations made computing accessible to all Dartmouth students and faculty, and soon after, to people across the nation and the world.
Dartmouth's BASIC at 50 anniversary celebration was held yesterday, which included the public premier of a documentary on the history and impact of BASIC.
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A: To stamp out forest fires.
Q: Why do elephants have big flat feet?
A: To stamp out flaming ducks.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:00PM
I agree. The ability to type quickly has been invaluable to me. Honestly, though, I don't see a phone-sized input device ever being fast enough to replace a full-sized keyboard. Hands aren't getting any smaller - keyboards need to be "hand sized" to make full use of our fingers. A switch to Dvorak would probably help, too.
I'm not even sure voice recognition can fully replace typing. I've found that when I do speech to text, I say lots of ums and uhs and ers and then I want to go back and change things. Then I reach for the keyboard.
Perhaps future generations will finally have good enough voice recognition to make using it more efficient than typing, but somehow I doubt that will happen for quite some time.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:23PM
Dvorak isn't going to make you significantly faster. It will make you happier, however, as you'll experience less RSI and strain since you don't have to contort your fingers as much with it.
Another alternative to explore is COLEMAK; it has most of the benefits of Dvorak but is easier to learn for QWERTY typists since it only moves a handful of keys, unlike Dvorak which moves almost all of them.