Keys of the Past and Present

Welcome to Becoming Sage, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary! This is Elan Baumgarten. Perhaps you typed something into your keyboard to find this podcast. You probably typed something into a keyboard working today. This episode will explore the history of keyboards, typewriters, and everything that has to do with clicking and clacking those keyboard keys! The original keyboards came from typewriters. Christopher Sholes is responsible for patenting the first practical typewriter. He did this in 1868. The Remington Company started the first mass marketing of typewriters. That was in 1877. One of the first things that an avid typer might think about when you bring up keyboards, is QWERTY. QWERTY are the first six letters of the standard keyboard. It is also the name for this keyboard layout, which is the most common layout in English-speaking countries such as the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and many others. This keyboard design was actually patented by Sholes himself. The reason that QWERTY was invented was to avoid jamming. Due to the mechanical mechanisms inside these early typewriters, they had to separate commonly used letter pairs to avoid jamming. These early typewriters would push a metal hammer, triggered by the pressing of a key, into an arc-like motion. This metal hammer would strike a ribbon soaked in ink, which would make an imprint on the paper. Thus… the need for common pairs of letters to be separated. Over time, other keyboard layouts would be invented, but QWERTY would remain king over the other designs. Even today, almost everyone who types English uses QWERTY. The basic reasoning for why a switch was never made is that QWERTY is efficient enough, and almost everyone is fairly familiar with it. This reduces any potential for a competing designer to have commercial success. In the 1930s, new keyboard models combined a punch-card system with typewriters to create keypunches. These were essentially early adding machines, which did very well commercially. By 1931, IBM had already sold a million dollars worth of adding machines. The systems that made the adding machines work were important for the earliest computers in the 40s and 50s, which used this keypunch system. Such computers include the Binac computer which used an electro-magnetically controlled typewriter. These electric typewriters closed the gap between typewriters and computers even more as time passed on. By the mid-60s, MIT, General Electric, and Bell Laboratories had created Multics, a multi-user computer system. The Video Display Terminal’s creation was encouraged by the emergence of this new system. This VDT allowed users of a computer interface to actually see what they were typing. All of the new electromagnetic systems inside of these new modern keyboards became a lot for them to handle, and by the late 70s and early 80s, all keyboards became electronic. The 90s saw the introduction of handheld devices. The first major handheld device to be released was the HP95LX. It came out in 1991 and was a product of what would eventually become HP and HPE after the company split in two. It was small enough to fit inside your hand, and would eventually become a part of the Personal Data Assistants, or PDAs for short. It too, contained a small QWERTY keyboard. It was so small that touch typing was impractical. There were attempts to make the keyboard obsolete, especially with the introduction of pen input. Using a pen to write out letters, words, and phrases. Unfortunately, the technology to recognize these pens wasn’t good enough to warrant actual use in the early 90s. Even for PDAs, most of the early renditions were not commercially available. Somewhat recently, something called the “soft keyboard” has become widely popular, especially among tablets and cell phones. The soft keyboard uses touchscreen technology to have a keyboard that can disappear whenever it is not in use. The durability of a keyboard today is measured in how many “clicks” it has before you would need to replace it. Thank you for listening to Becoming Sage, where the ordinary becomes Extraordinary. This is Elan Baumgarten. Don’t forget to tune in next time and share us with your friends and family.