Here’s one theory. In 1901, Underwood No. 5 added the third key between M and right Shift. They decided to put a slash on that key (unshifted). It seems they also decided to put the question mark above comma, shifted.pic.twitter.com/xy5T1CX3gq
Writing a book about the history of keyboards: http://aresluna.org/shift-happens · Design manager @figmadesign · Typographer · Occasional speaker · He/him
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Here’s one theory. In 1901, Underwood No. 5 added the third key between M and right Shift. They decided to put a slash on that key (unshifted). It seems they also decided to put the question mark above comma, shifted.pic.twitter.com/xy5T1CX3gq
Most of typewriters were used for commerce then. You can see a lot of ready-made vulgar fractions, commercial @ sign, a cent key, and so on.
Slash was likely much more useful in commerce than a question mark. Why? You’d use it to create all kinds of fractions. Many prices and wages back then were still parts of a dollar, rather than multiples of dollar.
As it happened, Underwood No. 5 was a great typewriter. It became massively popular, and became something of a keyboard layout standard.
A few decades later, a small company called Electromatic worked on an electric typewriter. An electric typewriter helps you in swinging the typebars – you need to touch the key gently, and the electrically-powered rolling bar does the rest of the work.pic.twitter.com/ZUx9o4SrxG
They knew Underwood No. 5 was greatly popular, so they just wanted to take their layout. But they encountered some new challenges.
For example, an electric typewriter is incredibly spry and some smaller symbols (dot, comma, dash, etc.) need to be impressed with less force… because if they met the paper with the same velocity as M or W, they’d simply puncture the paper.
To simplify the mechanism, the engineers decided to have “low velocity” symbols share the same key, so they could be slower whether the key was shifted or unshifted. And so, they moved things around; they put ' and " together on one key, and _ with - together on another.pic.twitter.com/IL5Lud5MQc
And since they couldn’t keep ? atop comma any more – one is “heavy,” the other one lighter – so they had to move ? somewhere else. The nearby slash was still in heavy use, but what was above it? A vulgar fraction, already a bit less important by that time. So a swap was made.
Electromatic wasn’t a big hit. It was bought by IBM and evolved into various Electric typewriters, which were also not hugely popular.pic.twitter.com/z34gNvFjMq
But then those, in turn, by 1960s, became IBM Selectric. And IBM Selectric was *huge.* It was so enormously successful that it basically redefined typewriters and became a de facto standard.pic.twitter.com/zzQCR84oM4
A few decades after that, IBM PC and Mac keyboards were modeled after it, and that in turn lead us to modern computers.pic.twitter.com/AcDRMDvCxp
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