May 22, 1988

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Last week Tony Hodges, a Palo Alto inventor, called about his nifty alternative keyboard. Horrors! say all the touch typists in the world. But cool your jets. Hodges seems to have something here.

Swing your hands up to your waist from the elbow: your curved fingers point at each other with the outside of your hands facing down.

Now put them in normal typing position. You flatten them to make them prone, then crank your wrists around. Hodges’ keyboard, called Tony, separates the keyboard into right and left keypads that themselves rotate and lift in the middle.

Sounds bizarre, but after using the Tony for less than 30 minutes last week, I could feel the difference. Now I know why I’ve had constant pain in my neck, shoulders, and wrists for the past decade-plus of pro typing. (This is becoming a newsroom/data-entry epidemic called “repetitive strain injury.”)

Women still do most typing, men do most product design, and Hodges has been shocked repeatedly by the cavalier responses from designers. One, in charge of “human factors” for a large company, said the pains were “spurious complaints of menopausal women.” Another, whose assistant was using the keyboard at the time, said, “We have to quantify pain.” She piped up, “Whose pain?” And yet another said, “They can take aspirin.”

But some have welcomed the idea. Jean-Louis Gassee at Apple Computer, for example, thought the keyboard’s “genius” is that it looks normal until moved by the user, taking away the fear of working with something totally new. And one design firm figured the production cost would be only twice that of a regular keyboard, or about $50. Somebody should jump on this.

GRATUITOUS RUMORING: And please leave Jean-Louis Gassee’s wife alone. Her husband is not leaving Apple. Gassee says he’s been hearing incessant rumors, too, ever since he sold off all his direct stock in Apple (he still has 350,000-plus options).

Yes, he’s getting along fine with John Sculley, he says. No, Mike Markkula (Apple’s co-founder and powerful board member) is not mad at him.

“Brigette, my beloved wife, goes to the grocery store, and they ask her am I leaving Apple?” says Gassee. “I bought this boat, so I go to the yard, I talk to the guy there. And the guy at the boat yard asked if I were leaving Apple.”

He says he’s not paranoid. At first he was angry, but now Gassee says it’s become comical. “People also believed that I was a model in Vogue. These stories take on a life of their own.”

So he’s philosophical. “There’s a saying in France,” says Gassee. “The higher the monkey climbs, the more people see his derriere. That’s the price I have to pay for working at Apple in a position like this, wearing an earring and being irreverent. But I’d rather be me than some people, anyway.”

ANOTHER SHOE DROPS AT PARC: Gary Starkweather, a 24-year veteran of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, left his post as a senior research fellow at Xerox nearly three months ago to “explore new opportunities” at Apple. Starkweather’s the guy who pioneered the first laser printer at PARC.

I heard he’s working on a color laser printer for Apple, but “I don’t know where that perception comes from,” he says. “I’m looking at all kinds of future stuff that Apple should be involved in.”

Starkweather assures that his leaving doesn’t mean that Xerox PARC is losing steam, despite the fact that many of its brilliant thinkers — most recently Adele Goldberg — have split to pursue commercial applications for PARC-related technologies.

“I don’t think it bodes anything for PARC. I’m just one of many who contributed there,” he says. “There are many good people left.”

GERALDO! She tried to keep it quiet, but word is out that Heidi Roizen, president and co-founder of T/Maker Corp. in Mountain View, was on a Geraldo Rivera theme show March 25, as one of seven “millionaire entrepreneurs” 30 or younger (no doubt hoping their success would rub off on him).

Rivera asked the two women whether they planned to make potential spouses sign prenuptial agreements. “I got off a pretty good one on that,” says Roizen. “The other woman said yes. But I said, ÔIt depends on whether the guy has more money than me. At my age, most of the guys I date are divorced and they’re just going to make back on me what they lost on their first wife.’”

Roizen’s T/Maker sells software. She distributes a Mac program called WriteNow for Steve Jobs’ NeXT Inc., thus the name of her live-in pet: H. Ross Parrot.

SIGN O’ THE TIMES: What’s the definition of UNIX? 500 AT&T scientists connected by a PR firm. (Thanks to PC Week’s Ken Siegmann.)