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.
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As it happened, Underwood No. 5 was a great typewriter. It became massively popular, and became something of a keyboard layout standard.
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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
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They knew Underwood No. 5 was greatly popular, so they just wanted to take their layout. But they encountered some new challenges.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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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At any given moment, people were already used to the key positions enough so that the creators tried to avoid the pain of moving things around; they only did so when it was technically or politically necessary.
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Keyboards were used for other things now – creative writing, programming, emails – but we never had a chance to start from scratch.
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There are exceptions. For example, Turkish typewriter layout was wholly redesigned in 1955, and you can see how the now less important / is less accessible than the question mark.pic.twitter.com/3gKPkOX50C
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