Delete keys – clipboard technology

For the last generation, Silicon Valley and Tokyo have been working to design computers that are ever easier to use. That is one thing, however, that has prevented the machines from becoming their user friendliest: you still have to input data with a keyboard, and that can require you to do a lot of typing and to memorize a lot of elaborate commands.

Enter the clipboard computer, a technology that has been in development for the last 20 years but took hold in mass market only nowadays. Clipboard PCs – which, as their name suggests, are not much bigger that an actual clipboard – replace the keyboard with a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen and electronic stylus. Users input data by printing individual letters directly on the screen. There are two technologies at work in a clipboard PC: one allows raw data to get into the computer to figure out what data means. The first technology relies principally on hardware and varies depending on the particular computer. In one system, marketed under the name GRIDPad, the computer’s LCD screen is covered with a transparent conductive coating. Voltage is sent across the glass in horizontal and vertical lines forming a fine grid, the voltage is slightly different. When the stylus – which is essentially a voltmeter – touches the screen, it informs the computer of the voltage at that point. The computer uses this information to determine where the stylus is and causes a liquid crystal pixel to appear at those coordinates. The position of the stylus is monitored several hundred times a second, so as the stylus moves across the glass, whole strings of pixels are activated.

“What we do is sort of connect the dots”, says Jeff Hawkins, the creator of GRIDPad. Users can then write whatever they want on the screen with a kind of electronic ink.

Making the writing comprehensible to the computer, however, requires the help of some powerful software. When the stylus is being used, the computer is programmed to look for moments when the tip doesn’t touch the screen for a third or second or more. Every time this happens – and it happens a lot when somebody is printing – the software assumes that one letter or number has been written. The pixel positions of this fresh character are then passed on to the computer’s pattern recognition software, which instantly identifies the letter or number written.

The software does this by first cleaning up the character – smoothing out crooked lines and removing errant dots. The remaining lines and curves are then compared with a series of templates in the computer’s memory that represent hundreds of thousands of different versions of very letter in the English alphabet and all ten numerals. When the computer finds the closest match, it encodes the character in memory and displays it on the screen as if it had been typed. The entire process takes just a fraction of a second. To delete a word, you simply draw a line through it. To move to the next page you flick the stylus at the bottom of the screen as if you are flicking the page of the book.

There are a handful of clipboard computers now on the market, including GRIDPad, which is sold in the US: Penvision, manufactured by NCR and sold around the world, and Sony’s Palmtop and Canon’s Al Note, both sold only in Japan. IBM and Apple are also pouring millions of dollars into the technology.

In addition to this hardware, a variety of software is also making its way to the market. Depending on the power of the computer and the sophistication of the software, clipboard systems can be programmed to understand the particular quirks of a particular user’s printing: this is an especially useful feature in Japan, where elaborate kanji characters make up most of the written language. Improvements in software may soon allow machines sold in the US to understand not only printing but continuous script as well.

Given such flexibility, the designers of clipboard computers are predicting big things – and a big market – for their products. “There’s no doubt about it”, says an optimistic Hawkins.” You’re going to own one of these things in the not-too-distant future.”