Of course they were dull! Imagine what would happen if office workers were inspired or encouraged to be creative in any way! 
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IBM used to sell much more colorful computers back in the day. The S/360 could be ordered in several colors even though it would live out its days hidden away in some machine room. I wonder what went wrong?
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Replying to @AxelKanne @eli_schiff
Nothing went “wrong,” really German standards might have been overzealous, but they started from the right place – video display terminals and early computers in the 1970s were ergonomically awful for people.
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The flickering screens, the glare from overhead lights, tough-to-press keyboards that you had to use for eight+ hours a day…
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Germans decided to be very prescriptive, backed their industrial standards with safety regulations that enforced them… and in lack of any other stuff, other countries adopted them – and IBM did, too, even outside of Germany.
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Later we found out that some of the rules were perhaps a bit too stringent and arbitrary, and market course corrected itself.
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Replying to @AxelKanne @eli_schiff
Yeah. Also, computers and keyboards changed in those 20+ years. German standards still prescribe the same thing, but a lot of keyboarding these days is much less intense than it was in 1970s, where poor women were stuck in windowless rooms, retyping information for hours on end.
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For example, German standards prescribed a 30mm keyboard height, making all keyboard manufacturers retool their lines for “low-profile keyboards.” Then, we learned that low-profile keyboards were not really better… but the market needed thinner and thinner keyboards anyway.pic.twitter.com/01wtQTKzXT
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So they got off scot-free on that. :·)
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