Eiiti Wada

Eiiti Wada (和田英一, 1 June 1931) is a computer scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo and the Research Director of Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ), a computer network technology company. He is one of the creators of the Happy Hacking Keyboard. Quotes The Macintosh Keyboard was one of the ancestors of HHKB. Other ancestors were VT100, Sun Workstation Type 2, 3, 4, etc. They were all typewriter paired keyboards. The HHKB inherited only the central key positions. On the other hand, the famous Teletype Model 33 keyboard, which was logical paired or bit paired, was not an ancestor of the HHKB. There were some logical pairing keyboards in Japan because JIS Standard supported the logical pairing. Since I am a Lisp programmer, the positions of parentheses and quotes are terribly inconvenient. Typewriter paired keyboards had parentheses on 9 and 0, while logical-paired keyboards had parentheses on 8 and 9. I also disliked the narrow keys on some Personal Computers. The TRON Project was not influential on the HHKB, although I know Ken Sakamura, the project leader, well. Or do you mean TRON keyboard? I have never seen it. TRON lives in a different world. Community interview with Professor Eiiti Wada When America’s cowboys were in the middle of a trip and their horse died, they would leave the horse there. But even if they were in the middle of a desert, they would take their saddle with them. The horse was a consumable good, but the saddle was an interface that their bodies had gotten used to. In the same vein, PCs are consumable goods, while keyboards are important interfaces. Newcomers might see the slanted key arrangement as strange, and love the squared ortholinear layout. But the current pattern is said to avoid the type bar conflict. *The present key arrangement has a functional beauty. Many typists and computer scientists are fully accustomed to it. Once accustomed, human beings can have a hard time learning the slightly different interface. Keyboards should maintain the present layout. Interview with Professor Eiiti Wada, Creator of the HHKB