[61] in bcs-newton
Newton Transcription Rate
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Carl R. Manning)
Wed Mar 24 10:42:39 1993
From: caroma@ai.mit.edu (Carl R. Manning)
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 93 10:38:04 EST
To: nanis@ll.mit.edu (Jeff Nanis)
Cc: bcs-newton@world.std.com
From: nanis@ll.mit.edu (Jeff Nanis)
Subject: Newton Transcription Rate
One of my biggest questions regarding Newton is how fast
it will be able to recognize handwriting. Is it going to digest
3-4 word/chunks (i.e. "Lunch Jane Tues") or will it support note-
taking at meetings and classes? As a non-speed typist, I want a
way to replace the old notepad/notebook without having a keyboard
(or the "barrier" of a flip-up screen). It would be extremely
useful to have all my notes stored electronically. Of course,
the other question is whether the initial memory will hold
several hours worth of notes before needing to be dumped to
a bigger machine.
Unless the handwriting recognition knows something about your note
taking language and what you're writing about, you may not want it to
recognize while you're taking notes (at least if you're taking notes
in a real-time situation, like in seminars) because it will make
mistakes which you may not be able to decipher later. It's hard
enough sometimes to decipher notes in context looking at the ink ---
if the recognizer changes the ink to the wrong word, you lose the
clues as to what other words you might have meant. Thus, it may make
sense to keep the notes as ink, and do the recognition later when you
have time to check the recognition before it throws the ink away.
How much ink can a Newton hold? I can't say for sure, not having any
details on its hardware or software, but we can get some ballpark
lower bounds by comparing with typical pen hardware:
o Digitizer sampling rate ~ 100 samples/second
o Digitizer resolution ~ 1000 points/inch (~400 points/cm)
So suppose there is no compression of ink and samples are stored as 4
bytes (~2 bytes each x and y). Let's also suppose that all your OS
and note taking software is in ROM (to save power and allow
instant-on), so your harddisk or PCMCIA cards are free for notes.
Then a 20 MByte PCMCIA card (e.g., SunDisk flashram or HP kitty-hawk
hard disk) would hold:
(20x2^20 bytes/card)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
(4 bytes/sample) * (100 samples/sec) * (60 sec/min) * (60 min/hr)
.
= 14.5 hrs of continuous uncompressed ink per 20Mbyte PCMCIA card
Of course, that ink can be compressed greatly since adjacent samples
are almost always very near each other. Also, note taking time will
be greater since you don't ink continuously when taking notes. And
PCMCIA card capacity will surely go up.
So as a rough ballpark figure, I would guess that you could keep at
least a week's worth of notes in their Newton just as ink, and most
people (who don't take voluminous notes) could keep a month's worth or
more. People who need the space or need to search or cross reference
everything will take the time to recognize much of it; others will
leave it as ink.
Caveat: This is just a "back of the envelope" guess. Hope this helps.
Cheers,
CarlManning
