stephen hawking

[miss sixty]

how does stephen hawking's synthesiser work??

[Clanad]

This from the Hawking Project: Prof. Hawking currently prefers a DOS-based solution built sometime in 1987 especially with his problems in mind. It is very thoughtfully designed, but has some fairly constraining limitations, given the current power and capability of modern microprocessor based computers. Chief among these is the fact that it does not support Cut-and-Paste and Undo. As can be well understood, this can present serious difficulties for anyone trying to work at a tolerably acceptable speed with limited control.
He also has a Windows based solution, but has found this difficult to work with and does not use it much.

Finally, he has an independent cursor control software that enables him to use other Windows applications such as Eudora, Mathematica and PCTex (LaTex for Windows), which are very important in his work. This is a pretty useful utility, but works by emulating the various point-and-clickable options of a standard mouse. Quite probably, some fresh thought applied to this are may result in a better solution, one that does not set limits by presupposing the user is familiar with a mouse.

He does not have access to the source code of any of these solutions. We must develop a system design keeping in mind the working of the software that he has grown used to and get his feedback before undertaking actual development. This will be an iterative process, but one that he is keen to help in, with whatever time he has available from his schedule.

The Hawking Project seeks to provide a more user friendly synthesizer for people with his disabilities, i.e., severely limited physical mobility... Check further information here: http://www.radiophony.com/html_files/hawking.html