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These keyboards aren’t made to be banged on.” “You’re banging on the keys, because that’s what you learned on those big metal typewriters. She looked at me for a minute, then asked, “Did you learn to type on a manual?” I found an older woman who worked there and told her how the keyboard hurt my fingers, and did they have anything else? Here’s a story: A few years ago I headed down to the Apple store to complain about the Apple Wireless keyboard I was using at the time. It has a silky feel that’s delightful, and although I may be kidding myself, it feels appreciably faster than my old keyboard. The most minimalist keyboard I’ve ever used, it feels like a thin slab on your desk. This connection of coding to art would blossom soon thereafter.
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I ran one of these at a large financial services company in New York, and it was the first time I experienced the connection between “coding” the material to be set, and the phototypesetter’s output of a graphic arts element. It ran with floppy drives and 8″ floppy disks–and they really flopped. One of the first commercial phototypesetters, the 1980 AM Comp Set could keep over 2,200 fonts online and boasted a memory of 80 K (“more than double any competitive machine”). It eventually morphed into the IBM Selectric Composer, a real typesetter with a memory function, one of the first of its kind. To this day, I’ve never operated a machine that was smoother or more enjoyable to work on than this one, and I held onto one of these beauties until a few years ago. Gone are the awkward keys that always stuck and slowed you down, gone is the klunky design, gone is the carriage moving back and forth. Without a doubt, the ultimate typewriter, the apotheosis of what a typewriter could be. I bet you have a history all your own with keyboards. I’ve worked on Wang word processors, the original Apple II, and so many others it’s hard to remember. They allow me to send my (formatted and edited) thoughts to you, no matter where you are in the world.Īlthough I’ve got a lot of keyboards to show you below, there are so many more that exist only in my memory. Yet they have carried the over-1-million words I’ve written on this blog.
MANUAL TYPEWRITER KEYBOARD FULL
I’ve got boxes full of keyboards in my garage, and I hardly notice the ones I use. Here’s a brief overview of my own history with these pedestrian objects. This past week I acquired a new computer, and with it came a new keyboard, the latest in a very long line of keyboards that have responded, for better or worse, to my banging on them. That day will surely come, but until then writers everywhere will rely on their keyboards as the most used piece of equipment in ours arsenal, the one that we are physically in contact with most of all. No one has yet devised a more efficient way for us to transfer our thinking to the digital realm, where it can be edited, manipulated, re-arranged, and analyzed in many ways. No, what interests me as a writer is the keyboard as a tool to move my thoughts from my head onto paper (in the case of typewriting) or even more remarkable, move them from the physical world into the digital world.īecause that’s what we do with our keyboards. A Personal History of the Modern Keyboard There’s a lot of history and lore to the invention of the typewriter, as well as lots of arguments for and against the “QUERTY” keyboard arrangement we’ve all had to learn.īut that’s not my interest today. Virtually the entire class consisted of us practicing repetitive letter combinations on the massive Royal and Remington typewriters bolted to the wooden desks in the typing room. The keys had no letters on them, they had been covered up because it was a “touch typing” class.
MANUAL TYPEWRITER KEYBOARD MANUAL
Words appear, flowing across the paper-or the screen these days-making arguments, entertainments, or simply shopping lists.īecause I’m older than you are, I learned to type on a manual typewriter in typing class in high school. Until then, watching someone else type is like watching a skilled musician coax beautiful music from a collection of metal, wood, plastic, and bone. Soon typewriters were in use in business, academia, and were the very symbol of the new age of mechanical efficiency.Īnd there is something exciting about learning your way around a keyboard for the first time. So the appearance of the typewriter signaled a true communications revolution. Up until that time, all writing by all writers, authors, novelists, historians, speechwriters-every one of them-was written by hand. Invented in the late 19th century along with the mechanism to imprint “type-writing” onto paper, keyboards first appeared as the operational end of the typewriter. I’ve been thinking about keyboards lately, you’ll see why in a minute. A Personal History of the Modern Keyboard.