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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Outside of Turkey, you will see that dash/underscore and quote keys are still in the same place today as they were in the original Electromatic 100 years ago – even though no one remembers the technical reasons. (And the same can be said about the entire QWERTY layout.)pic.twitter.com/SV305oOfje
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By the way, I am pretty sure this is not exactly how it went down; I am unsure it’s even possible to fully research it today.
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But I bet it was something *like* that. From Day Two, no one had a chance to fully design the keyboard – ask Dvorak how well that worked for him, and ask others who wished they were as successful as Dvorak.
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From Day Two, everyone was just forever tactically improving the original QWERTY layout, dealing with muscle memory out there and customers loving backwards compatibility – not to mention a host of technical considerations that fully disappeared only in the computer era.
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