Talk:Input Devices

Re-Write
I am considering rewriting this page or cutting out large portions of it. Since this is supposed to be a gentle introduction to computers in general, there should not be too much information that may overwhelm the reader. Lysander89 03:01, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm happy to volunteer to have a go at this page as well as the Output Devices page which I found via the 'Wikiversity cleanup' page. however, it seems a shame to loose much of the detail on this page for those who might be interested. Should this be preserved and broken into some sort of reference links for more detail on each section on the new simpler page? Inspeximus 18:00, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Keyboard
I've removed most of the annoying (to me at least) white space at the end of the Keyboard section. First I moved the second image tag upwards, then I removed the CLEAR tag, so that the image now impinges on the next section, but not unduly in my opinion. This would not happen if another small paragraph were added to the keyboard section. I was already thinking that the information is rather sparse. Thinking about the first comment above, I imagine technical info about how keyboards work is inappropriate here, but is it more important for the beginner to know things such as qwerty vs dvorak (and to learn to be sad about the minimal uptake of Dvorak) than to know about the different kinds of keys - alphanumeric, modifier, navigation, command etc? I wouldn't mind attempting a brief paragraph on this, but don't want to put the work in to find it deleted as being information overload.Alkhowarizmi (discuss • contribs) 06:55, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Light Pen
This paragraph is so garbled that I don't think I would understand any of it, were it not that I used one with some state-of-the-art-then specialised equipment around 25 years ago. The equipment was advanced at that time in terms of its hardware, using ECL (I think) logic for high speed digitising and analysis of analog inputs. However the operating system (CP/M) and pointing device were already obsolescent for general use. I could attempt rewriting this paragraph, but if, as I suspect, light pens are now a historical curiosity, might it be better to delete mention from this introduction?

Speech Recognition
Fortunately, the page has a section on scanners, which are input devices, and not on OCR, which is not. Likewise the microphone is an input device, speech recognition software is not. Unless there is an external device that turns speech into (encoded) text and sends the latter to the computer, then this section doesn't belong. Currently, it says " technology for this is not widespread" but that is no longer true, and many young students will already have access to speech recognition, and I imagine they are interested. So rather than deleting this section, I thought of moving it to another page. However, I'm not sure where. Either way, I am editing the keyboard section to add mention of scanners and microphones as input devices for text.