UPDATE: Click here to view Doug Engelbart demonstrating the gloves.
Amazing pair of early prototypes of The HandWriter typing glove that was co-developed by Douglas Engelbart and a team headed by Valerie Landau in early 2007. The HandWriter, a glove-based mobile keyboard designed for eyes-free, on-the-move usability, was conceptualized as an evolutionary upgrade to the five-key coding keyset, a device Engelbart introduced in tandem with the first computer mouse at his iconic 1968 'Mother of All Demos.’ The prototypes consist of a black left-handed gardening glove with gray grip, size medium, which Engelbart personally wore during a demonstration with Landau and noted tech blogger Robert Scoble in January 2008, and a black leather right-handed driving glove, size 7.5, which Landau wore during a HandWriter demo at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley, California, in December 2008. Both gloves feature swatches of silver Laird shielding tape to the lower palm and fingertips that run the length of the back of the hand and terminate at the wrist, with Landau’s glove retaining its taped cluster of seven wires. Included with Landau’s glove is its original 8.75″ x 4.75″ fabric input pad, which was also used during the NextNow event. In overall fine condition.
In the early 1960s, Engelbart’s innovative mouse and chorded keyset combo enabled users to ‘fly’ through digital information, granting people the ability to enter commands and type with one hand, while moving around the screen and selecting with the other. While the keyset was meant to supplement—not replace—a traditional keyboard, the idea for the HandWriter, would, in essence, make the keyboard a nonnecessity. An intrepid idea even now, but Professor Landau and Engelbart were convinced: to create a modern version of mobile computing, traditional concepts needed tinkering.
In the spring of 2007, Landau received $12,500 in funding to research and develop a typing glove based on Engelbart’s ideas of binary typing. They called it the HandWriter. A visionary hand device developed for eyes-free and on-the-go situations, the HandWriter went through several working prototypes, two of which are presented here. The typing glove experimented with writing systems like Devanagari, Cyrillic, and Braille, and was tested by dozens of practical users, including college students, the vision impaired, and high-performance knowledge workers who would walk and take notes.
