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
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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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
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.
Keyboards were used for other things now – creative writing, programming, emails – but we never had a chance to start from scratch.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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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