Tech: A tiny history of T9
February 19, 2004 · Leave a Comment
This entry was originally at http://kingsley.blog-city.com/read/493850.htm
Technoscribe says(scroll to the bottom) ”… a guy in the mid 90’s who’s father, following serious a road accident, had only eye movement left. His son, a software writer, had a pair of spectacles made for his dad which picked up his eye movements and translated them into letters on his PC. He then wrote an algorithm which reduced the number of eye movements needed to form whole words. A year or two later he spotted another application for the software, so he called it T9 Predictive Text and went looking for customers.”
T9 ofcourse, is the predictive text input system that makes it so much easier to type “SMS SUCKS” on tiny mobile phones. I know a lot of people have problems typing with this system, but I love it. The thing I love most about it is that it has made it easier to type the English word than to type it the SMS-ese (”SMS SUX”) equivalent.
A slightly longer history of T9 is available from Tegic, the folks who first commercialized its usage.
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