Word: keyboard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tape decks. Through an electronic interface called MIDI, the computer can be used to sequence the various synthesizers and to modify sonic waveforms. One interesting feature of the Mirage is its ability to take digital samples of sounds in the "real world" and alter their pitch via a keyboard. This technology can be used for such interesting creations as chords of barking dogs and melodies of clinking coins...
...networkers are equally candid about kinks in the computer services. "It's frequently not very much fun," warns Stewart Alsop, who does much of the research and correspondence for his biweekly P.C. Letter on the networks and still gets lost in their labyrinthine menus. Consumers who shop by keyboard complain that on-line service can be sluggish and undependable. Orders placed electronically may reach retailers in a flash, but they are often filled by hand and thus subject to human inefficiencies. A Sears color TV that Hovanees ordered through CompuServe's Electronic Mall never did arrive. And, as Peggy Berk...
Toad gave up pen and pencil years ago, when he discovered the Smith-Corona manual portable typewriter. Toad loved his Smith-Corona. He played upon it like a flamboyant pianist. Now he massaged the keyboard tenderly through a quiet phrase, now he banged it operatically, thundering along to the chinging bell at the end of the line, where his left arm would abruptly fire into midair with a flourish and fling home the carriage return...
...life, until one day, Toad, when riding his bicycle in the park, took a disastrous spill. Left thumb broken, arm turned to fossil in a cast, out of which his fingers twiddled uselessly, Toad faced the future. He tried one-handing his word processor, his hand jerking over the keyboard like a chicken in a barnyard...
Most misdeeds boiled down to what Donn Parker, a computer-crime watcher at SRI International, calls "data diddling"--entering false numbers at a keyboard. To pay for his wife's drug purchases, for example, a programmer at a savings and loan company in Los Angeles transferred $5,000 into his personal account and tried to cover up the switch with phony debit and credit transactions. The error was picked up in a routine bank audit. Among the 15 programmers and ten students nabbed, the offenses committed most often were thefts of software and telecommunications services. The rest of the crimes...