Word: keyboard
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DIAL M FOR MODEM Last week AT&T unveiled 25 Internet pay phones at airports in New York, Atlanta and Dallas. The AT&T Public Phone 2000i has a 12-in. screen, a full-size keyboard and a touch pad. Internet access comes at a reasonable 25[cents] per minute (with a 4-min. minimum), and callers can talk and surf at the same time. No, you don't get your quarter back if you don't have any e-mail...
GIRL POWER It's great to encourage girls to learn about computers, and if it takes a spokesdoll like Barbie to get them interested, more power to her. The Barbie B-Book ($59.99) isn't a real laptop in any sense of the word, but it has a full keyboard and a pink-and-lavender mouse (with matching mouse pad), and it talks in that inimitable Barbie voice--it sounds like Britney Spears huffing helium. The B-Book comes preloaded with 50 educational games,including Search 'n' Spell, Zoo Clues and, uh, Shop 'til You Drop...
...Mobile Assistant IV, a "wearable computer" produced by Xybernaut, a small Fairfax company. It's hard to believe, but the doodads attached to my head and waist add up to a full-fledged PC, with 233-MHz Pentium chip, 32-MB memory and upwards of 3 GB storage. The keyboard on my wrist has 60 keys, and there is a trackball built into the central processor. Suspended in front of my left eye is a full-color vga screen scarcely larger than a postage stamp but so close it could just as easily be a 15-inch monitor...
...then the soccer scores and my e-mail. I considered playing an online computer game, but then remembered that I'm lousy at those. So I sent a how-are-you message to my boss in Hong Kong. For the first 10 minutes I fumbled with the tiny keyboard and trackball. But soon I was able to write entire sentences with relative ease - about 10 words a minute, against my usual 60. After half an hour I was comfortable enough to think and type at the same time. As a test, I wrote the first paragraph of this article...
...attic above me, an animal has died. A carrion smell seeps through the ceiling. A squirrel, maybe. A raccoon? For a week, I heard something scuttling up there - as if to answer the clicking of my computer keyboard. I was amused to think the animals were weighing in with a contrary point of view. I assumed that a creature that had found its way into the attic would find its way out. Then the scuttling stopped, and in a day or two, the dead smell began. I must go up through the trap door in the ceiling in the hall...