Re:Morse Code (Score 1)

As Jeff Hawkins tells the story, he invented and implemented Graffitti in a couple days after noting how poor the state of the art in handwriting recognition was. The Palm's early success was largely due to eschewing the huge problem of reading natural handwriting in favor of briefly retraining users to make the recognition task easier. Recognition on a small set of characters with ordered and directed strokes is an order of magnitude easier than visual-style recognition based on the appearance of a character. Nowadays this is becoming less important as natural handwriting recognition improves. The goal, as in speech recognition, is to not make a user speak to/write for a computer any differently than for another human.