Great article take a look enjoy may your day be filled with fun, laughter and may and evening where ever in the world you may live.
Smile always a nice thing to do it is we know it :)
If not oh well lol
Kimberly
TV REALITY MOM
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http://media.bemyapp.com/history-lesson-keyboard/
History Lesson: The Keyboard
Why Is The Keyboard So Weird?
As anybody with a degree related to
technology design can tell you, the modern keyboard as we know it is a
rigorously designed typing interface whose key placement has been
researched and refined over the years. The keyboard layout is the least
intuitive thing ever to be built, requiring hours of painstaking
training in typing class to learn, so there must be very, very good
reasons for W to be between Q and E and not anywhere else. Designing to
be user-friendly, even if not obvious at first glance, is the epitome of
priority in the interface to our most important communication device.
Humans would not do this to themselves for no reason.
Right?
And if we pull your other leg, it will play Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
Friends, what we call the modern computer
keyboard is an evolved system of appendices and ideas whose purposes
have faded to antiquity. It was designed by shrugs and guesses, and kept
around today for no other purpose than inertia. When we translated
keyboards to the on-screen model used today on tablets and smartphones,
there was no reason (yet again!) to keep the QWERTY layout. In fact,
there has been no good reason for many generations of devices. But here
we go again! We have always done it this way, so we go on doing it this
way. Design students, the most important thing you will ever learn about
“intuitive user interfaces” will be found in the history of the
keyboard.
An anecdote: An engineer vacationing in
Bali went to see one of their famous temples. Within that temple, he
beheld a statue to one of the many Balinese gods, and a line of faithful
worshipers before it. In turn, each worshiper would approach the statue
and kiss its right toe, then leave. The engineer noticed, from the
years of wear, that the toe was polished, and he got in line to give it a
closer look. He was curious if the toe on the right was worn down
further, so when his turn came, he wanted to measure it. But he didn’t
think to bring a ruler, so he used the pen from his pocket as a quick
gauge, measuring one toe and then the other. After he left, he glanced
back at the rest of the line, only to see that each worshiper after him
would now likewise take the pen from their pocket, tap each of the
statue’s toes, and leave without kissing. They say this is the new
tradition to this day.
We have always done it this way, so we go on doing it this way.
In the beginning was the typewriter
The mechanical typewriter was the first
to use the QWERTY keyboard layout, and the reasons for it have faded
into myth and legend. Take your pick: The key placement helped keep the
mechanical arms from jamming; the layout allowed the word “typewriter”
to be typed from the top row for salesmen to demonstrate in the
showroom; the layout was intended to slow down typists so they don’t
make so many mistakes; or the letter order allows all codes in the
Masonic Ciphers book to be typed in cadence.
The keys are also in staggered diagonal
rows because each key originally connected to an arm that had to make it
all the way to the platen. Plus, the CAPS LOCK key, aside from being
placed in a location handy for yelling on the Internet, was a lever lock
that locked down the shift key – so named because it physically moved
the whole platen up and down to produce upper and lower case letter from
the same key. And the backspace key is in the upper right corner
because it moved the whole carriage back a space.
But where the mechanical typewriter
really impacted computer technology was in the line-break formatting
bug. Because the act of hitting the ‘enter’ key as we do now was
originally produced with two separate actions: The carriage return and
the line feed. The carriage return just shifted the whole carriage over
to start at the left, without advancing the line. It had to be that way
because you can’t delete on paper; you had to use correction fluid and
then type back over the error. The line feed simply advanced the paper
one line.
When we moved to text files on a
computer, clearly we only needed one of these skeuomorphs – but which
one? Whenever the computer industry gets a choice like this, it always
ends up in trouble. Unix platforms chose to preserve the LF (line feed,
Unicode U+000A), Apple systems chose to preserve the CR (carriage
return, Unicode U+000D), and Microsoft came along and said, “Hey, you
know what would really screw everything up?” They used both. Thus, the
great line break incompatibility bug was born, and to this day
programming languages have a difference between a ‘\n’ and a ‘\r’. And
Unicode has about a dozen different ways to say “start a new line here.”
Double Bucky, you’re the one!
Our beloved Jargon File takes over the
show for the next round of keyboard folklore. To put the problem in a
nutshell, keyboard designers noticed right away that mere alphabet
letters were just the beginning. Clearly, everybody wants keys that do
something they have to do often, like halt program execution or type the
Pi symbol or unmount the day’s tapes. But what functions to build in,
and what to leave out? The answer usually turned out to be “Why leave
anything out?” This was feature creep in keyboard form.
It led to the Space cadet keyboard, the
basis for many golden age computer input devices for generations to
come, including the popular IBM Model-Ms. The Space Cadet keyboard just
kept piling on shift keys, meta-shift keys, and meta-meta-meta shifts
until you could type Japanese, Hebrew, Norwegian, Cyrillic, and probably
Kingon if you knew the right chords.
The F1-F12 (which stood for ‘function’)
keys were the biggest holdover from this era, reasoning that programmers
could assign special meaning to these keys as the needs fit. Beyond
that, the ‘super’ key became the designated fourth bucky-bit. On PC
keyboards this became the notorious ‘Windows’ logo key, and on the
MacIntosh it became the weird pretzel shape. Both of them, if you read
keypress events on the bit-level, show up as some kind of ‘super’ shift
event.
A mile of appendices:
Print Screen: Originally
saved a dump of the screen text to the printer – the green bar laser
printer, that is – on a text terminal. Evolved into taking a screenshot
in a graphics sense.
SysRq: Originally was
“system request,” originally to perform low-level interrupts. Typically,
the key would call the BIOS on an IBM clone. Some Linux kernels have
scavenged this key to provide crash-recovery and system coredump
functions.
Scroll Lock: This is the
most notorious ‘appendix’ key, because it gets everyone’s attention.
It’s one of three keys important enough to get their own green glowing
LED on decades of keyboards, and nobody, anywhere, ever used it. Scroll
lock was used to freeze the screen on a text terminal during a text file
dump, to pause output until you could catch up reading.
Pause / Break: Used by programmers to halt execution of code during debugging.
The number pad: Has its own interesting
history. Quick data entry needed a compact keypad in the ten-key
configuration, so the golden age keyboards simply tacked this on the
side. It became a de-facto control module for generations of hackers and
gamers. To this day, 3D software suites like Blender use the keypad for
navigating around 3D space. It was even possible in some older Unix
systems to use the number pad as a mouse emulator.
As a side note, there was a mouse hate
backlash for awhile! Typing purists believed taking your hand off the
keyboard to use the mouse was sacrilege; this push culminated in the Ratpoison Window Manager designed
to kill the mouse (the ‘rat’). We dare you to download and install it
in the modern day. Actually, it might not work, because who has an old
keyboard lurking around anymore?
Now how important is intuitive design again?
So why, continuing into the laptop,
tablet, and phone era, has the computer keyboard kept these archaic
trappings? The kind of designers known as “information architects” will
snidely condescend that good design = intuitive, but in fact it’s become
apparent over the years that good design is whatever random interface
we cobbled together in the first place, followed by decades of keeping
it that way because nobody wants to learn to do things differently.
See also: The imperial measures system and automatic transmissions.
We have always done it this way, so we go on doing it this way.
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