[26297] in Hotline Meeting
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chelle Gentemann)
Wed Jan 4 22:10:27 1995
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 04 Jan 1995 22:10:16 EST
From: Chelle Gentemann <eddietwo@MIT.EDU>
[ I am not sure which mailing list to send this comment to. If it should be
sent elsewhere, please let me know. Thanks ]
This is a small comment concerning the ergonomics of Athena workstations.
In most clusters, you can wander around and see that a significant number of
workstation monitors have been moved off the workstations and placed to the
side, making them a little lower. People like having lower monitors for many
reasons, not the least that it is considered more ergonomic, placing the top
of the monitor at or below eye level.
On some of the newer workstations, however -- I am thinking particularly of the
Suns in W20-575, although problems exist in other clusters too -- the
workstation is bolted (or whatever) to the center of a desk, with the side
effect that when the monitor is taken off the workstation, it must be placed
far to one side of the desk. This makes typing and working less comfortable for
obvious reasons (you have to either always be looking diagonally, or you run
into the desk's legs with your chair, or whatever).
I would propose that the anchor pads and workstations be moved about 9 inches
off center on each desk (to the left, as most people are right-handed). That
way, people could either have the monitor on top of the workstation, or to one
side, without the problems of a far-off-center monitor in either case.
Just a dumb ergonomic thought,
love,
ed
eddietwo@mit.edu
