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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Which is why *SMOOTH COMMERCIAL SEGUE ALERT* I like the title of my upcoming book, Shift Happens. So please buy my book (eventually), and subscribe to my newsletter (now)!https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/ …
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