Friday, May 27, 2005

Court Reporter Steno Machines...



Via Gizmodo, I've always wondered how those things the court reporters type on work. You would think that with all of the technology today, they would have found a way to update these things, but I guess if it ain't broke then don't fix it.

This Slate story talks about how the Stenotype machine works. Interesting. Snippet:

It's called a stenotype machine, and it's also used for captioning television broadcasts and general office stenography. The stenotype works a bit like a portable word processor, but with a modified, 22-button keyboard in place of the standard qwerty setup. Modern stenotypes have two rows of consonants across the middle, underneath a long "number bar." Set in front of these are four vowel keys: "A," "O," "E," and "U."


Now, the other thing I want to know is how surveying equipment works. Those little telescopes, the reflectors on sticks... Can't you do all of this with GPS now?

Enjoy.

-aB

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The main difference between a steno keyboard and a regular one is that you can hit every key at once. So you can hit all 22-plus keys at one time, and it's as fast as you can hit one letter. That's how you can get the speed.