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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