It's the second volume in a set of books about the history
of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with
text on various devices. This volume got into more modern history.
Sometimes I was learning stuff, but other times I was just
wallowing in nostalgia.
Or maybe "nostalgia" isn't the right word. What's the word
for when you find out that you misunderstood what was going
on at the time?
Decades ago, I thought I cured my repetitive strain injury by
making sure I used different types of keyboard at home and at
work. Now, reading this book, I figured out that what really
cured my RSI is that the new "different" keyboard I bought for home
was thinner than older keyboards, and thus didn't encourage my
wrists to bend so much.
(OK, there was regular ol' nostalgia, too.
Talking about Japanese text entry, I remembered
how the then-newfangled Canon WordTank was so
much easier to use than my Nelson's
paper kanji dictionary. At the time, such
a game-changer. Nowadays, the idea of a separate
dictionary device seems absurd, tho.)
Anyhow, there's modern keyboard history, how keyboards
migrated onto our phones, then (alas) to our phone screens.
There are a couple of
chapters about modern keyboard enthusiasts who soup up
their keyboards with custom designed keys, custom-built
boards… Uhm, I didn't really try to follow those
chapters too closely because I already have enough hobbies.
(Also, I would feel bad if I spilled snacks on a
nice keyboard, so that's a deal-breaker.)
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It's the first volume in a set of books about the history
of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working
with text on various then-newfangled devices.
I learned a lot, which might kind of surprise you; I'd already
learned plenty about the history of
this technology and that technology.
But focusing on text brings you to some weird corners.
E.g., in the very-early days of typewriters, a typist
couldn't see what they'd typed; the marks were under the paper,
hidden by the typewriter mechanism. You might say "Well, any
serious typist learns to touch-type at some point;
but I dunno if I could work up the resolve to learn touch typing
if I couldn't see my work when I was starting out.
I learned about Linotype spacebands. A linotype lets a typesetter
make a line-of-type by typing text, laying out an array of letterform
molds. But this tool, for book and newspaper publishers, supports
full-justified text. It did that by changing the spacing between words;
not so hard if they're just blips of light on a computer screen, but
tricky when they're pieces of metal sitting in a track.
It turns out that while the letter-pieces were flat, spaces were
spacebands,
tall subtly-slanted wedges.
|..____⚺____⚺___⚺__⚺___.|
When you'd entered a line of text, the machine would push down on the
wedges, forcing apart the words until those words hit the edges of the
track.
|_____ _____ ____ ___ ___|
V V V V
They fit snugly enough such that when hot lead was poured over the track,
it probably didn't leak past those wedges.
I learned something about the history of the telegraph, surprising
since I studied that pretty hard while coming up with ideas for that
Telegraph Hill puzzle hunt. I learned about some of the also-ran
devices that were devised, false starts towards usability. Many people
saw that electricity could be used for communication. Someone at point
A closes an electrical circuit; this causes something to
happen at point B, far away but also on that electric circuit.
But what should happen? It shouldn't require too much power; you'd have
to drive that much power through the circuit. (Modern folks
might think "why not run a little trickle of power through the circuit
and use it to trigger a transistor to something more powerful at
the receiving end?" but of course this is all before transistors.)
I read about the efforts Francisco Salva Campillo, who had the idea
of using
twitching
severed frogs' legs at the receiving end to indicate when the
circuit was closed. I'm really glad I didn't
try to write a puzzle around that.
So far, so good. Onward to Volume №2.
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Book Report: S v Z
This book accompanies Tauba Auerbach's exhibit now showing at SFMoMA. It's an interesting piece of art in its own right. That's a good thing, I guess? I find myself comparing it to an earlier book d...
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Further Bewordled
I read Allison Parrish's article "Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish," in which she discusses the design of the card game Rewordable. Like Scrabble and Bananagrams, in Rewordable a player builds u...
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I made a little program to generate "ransom note" text using fancy international symbols like "İ 𝗺Ąⅅ𝔼 𝔸 𝔩𝒊ŦƬ𝕃🝗 ᑭ𝗥Ⲟ𝙶ꞅ𝙰𝗺 t𝕆 𝔾ƐŊЄᏒa𝞣𝐸 'Ꮢ𝛢𝛮💲⎔⩋ Ŋ⎔Ƭ𝛦' Ƭ𝐸𝑿t 𝑼ຣi𝓝𝙶 🝡𝘈𝚗𝘾γ 𝒊𝚗𝚃𝙴Rn⩜𝚃İ⬯Ⲛaℒ ട𝘺ოβ⎔ℓS." ...
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As a wordplay enthusiast, I was excited to hear about an old book called Ars Magna by Ramon Llull that tried to find new occult truths by re-arranging letters. The letters of "Ars Magna", after all, ...
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Free Donald Knuth lecture coming up… about Metafont. Clever guy, but not my topic. I probably won't go, but maybe you're interested. ...
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Fear and Loathing in Alternate Reality
Warning: this blog rant contains a mild spoiler for act two of the Games of Nonchalance a.k.a. "The Elsewhere Public Works Agency". It won't spoil any "puzzle": what makes the situation so dreadful...
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Book Report: Alphabet Juice
This book is a sort of lexicon, except that instead of definitions there are riffs. These are some of the author's favorite words, or at least words that he wanted to write about. He likes to pron...
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Site: Tauba Auerbach / The Alphabet Variations
You may recall that I went to a gallery a couple of weeks ago. It was some art by Tauba Auerbach, including two that featured an alphabetload of overlapping letterforms. I'd wondered what they woul...
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Book Report: How to Spell the Alphabet
A while back, I pointed out some not-exactly-puzzle-ish-but-not-exactly-not-either images by Tauba Auerbach. I finally broke down and sent away for a book of her work, How to Spell the Alphabet. To...
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Park Challenge
Today Team Unwavering Resolve (a.k.a. Steven Pitsenbarger, Paul du Bois, and I) played in Park Challenge, a puzzle hunt game organized by the Desert Taxi folks. It was a fun stroll in Golden Gate Pa...
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