Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer from I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And you know, not
Speaker 1: long after the invention of computers, engineers began to lean
Speaker 1: pretty heavily on an older technology for the purposes of
Speaker 1: inputting data, in other words, getting information into the computer.
Speaker 1: And it was to figure out a way to do that,
Speaker 1: either directly or indirectly into those computational machines. The older
Speaker 1: technology I'm talking about is, of course, the typewriter, and
Speaker 1: we gradually saw the evolution of the computer keyboard. And
Speaker 1: we're about eighty years out from those days where keyboards
Speaker 1: were starting to become a thing for computers. They didn't
Speaker 1: always look the way they do today. Some of the
Speaker 1: keyboards for early computers were just you know, numeral pads
Speaker 1: and not a full keyboard. But my point is we're
Speaker 1: eighty years out and the keyboard is still around, whether
Speaker 1: it's an actual physical keyboard or an on screen one,
Speaker 1: or even one of those fancy laser ones where it
Speaker 1: projects it on a on a flat surface and you
Speaker 1: just move your fingers to the the area on the
Speaker 1: surface that is designated a key anyway, we've we've stuck
Speaker 1: with that form factor for decades, nearly a century in fact,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about typewriters, more than a century. So
Speaker 1: today I wanted to talk a bit about the history
Speaker 1: of the keyboard, as well as some alternatives that people
Speaker 1: have proposed to the old TYPEE TYPEE it's like to
Speaker 1: call it, and perhaps explore why nothing has really taken
Speaker 1: its place so far. Now, before I jump in, I
Speaker 1: do want to acknowledge that there are other user interfaces
Speaker 1: out there that have become popular. Touch screens have removed
Speaker 1: some of the need for keyboards, at least for certain applications.
Speaker 1: Voice commands are popular in some contexts, but not all.
Speaker 1: You might use voice commands for a hands free experience
Speaker 1: with your phone or to interact with a smart speaker,
Speaker 1: But for most of us, I would wager that we
Speaker 1: don't use voice interaction with our computers. But I also
Speaker 1: want to acknowledge that while that may be true for
Speaker 1: most of us, it's certainly not true for all of us.
Speaker 1: Voice interaction is an important component and provides accessibility options
Speaker 1: for people who might not otherwise be able to interact
Speaker 1: with computers using a traditional keyboard, at least not do
Speaker 1: so easily. So please understand I'm not dismissing alternatives out
Speaker 1: of hand, but rather exploring why the keyboard form factor
Speaker 1: these days, also coupled with the computer mouse, has remained
Speaker 1: constant over multiple generations of computers. So, as I said,
Speaker 1: the predecessor to the keyboard was the good old typewriter,
Speaker 1: and the predecessor of that device was the Tarot type,
Speaker 1: a sort of proto typewriter. That's p T E R
Speaker 1: O T Y p E. Actually you could just call
Speaker 1: the Pterot type a typewriter, though the mechanisms and keyboard
Speaker 1: layout would be different from later devices. A man named
Speaker 1: John Jonathan Pratt born in eighteen thirty one, invented it.
Speaker 1: John Pratt was born in South Carolina, and he lived
Speaker 1: in the South, making him a citizen of the Confederacy
Speaker 1: during the Civil War. He was also a slave owner
Speaker 1: until eighteen sixty one, whereupon he sold them in order
Speaker 1: to travel to the UK, where he would show off
Speaker 1: his device in an effort to get patents could be
Speaker 1: He had figured, you know, pretty much on the money
Speaker 1: that being a citizen of the Confederacy would mean he
Speaker 1: would see very little support from the U. S. Patent Office,
Speaker 1: so he thought he would bypass that and go to
Speaker 1: England instead, so the Tarotype would become the first typewriter
Speaker 1: device sold to the public, but many scholars referred to
Speaker 1: him as the grandfather of the typewriter, not the father
Speaker 1: of it. The keys of the pterotype were laid out
Speaker 1: very differently than the ones you would find on a
Speaker 1: modern computer or typewriter keyboard. On the left side, you
Speaker 1: had a top row of numerals, but it was just
Speaker 1: two through six, and then you had three rows of
Speaker 1: letters in alphabetic order A through M. Then you had
Speaker 1: on the right side, so split from the left side,
Speaker 1: you had a similar arrangement. You had the top row
Speaker 1: with numerals seven, eight, and nine, plus a comma and
Speaker 1: a period. Then you had three rows of letters in
Speaker 1: through y. You were supposed to use I and oh
Speaker 1: to represent one in zero. That's why there were no
Speaker 1: one or zero buttons there. And there was a really
Speaker 1: big button for spaces to put space between letters. So
Speaker 1: when you finished one word and we're about to start another,
Speaker 1: so this is p key time era, that's a pre quirty.
Speaker 1: If you were to come across. The first commercial typewriter
Speaker 1: device today, like the first one that was really being sold,
Speaker 1: the terotype was intended to be, but they're very few
Speaker 1: that were produced. You would probably think you had encountered
Speaker 1: some sort of steampunk esque sci fi gadget. A Danish
Speaker 1: inventor named Rasmus Molling Hansen built a device generally called
Speaker 1: the writing Ball. He mounted the keys on a semi
Speaker 1: sphere that, in turn was mounted above the carriage that
Speaker 1: held the paper. And it makes me think it's a
Speaker 1: cross between R two D two and Pinhead from the
Speaker 1: movie Hell Raiser, if Pinhead had typing keys instead of
Speaker 1: pins stuck out of his noggin. While the writing Ball
Speaker 1: was the first commercial typewriter device, it wasn't a widespread success,
Speaker 1: though Hansen apparently sold quite a few in England. These
Speaker 1: devices today go for a pretty penny or actually a
Speaker 1: lot of pretty pennies at auction, fetching more than a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars in some cases princely some. But as
Speaker 1: much as I would love a globe shaped keyboard for
Speaker 1: my computer, it's not the form factor that stuck around.
Speaker 1: An American feller by the name of Christopher Latham Shoals
Speaker 1: gets the credit for being the father of the proper
Speaker 1: modern typewriter. Shoals was born in eighteen nineteen in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: He apprenticed to a printer to learn a trade, and
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty seven he and his older brothers moved
Speaker 1: out to Green Bay, Wisconsin. The brothers published a newspaper
Speaker 1: out in Green Bay. Christopher landed a job as the
Speaker 1: editor of the Wisconsin Inquirer in Madison, and after being
Speaker 1: editor of a couple of other newspapers, he decided to
Speaker 1: try his hand at politics and was elected to the
Speaker 1: state legislature. By the eighteen sixties, Shoals was inventing devices
Speaker 1: to make life easier for those who work with paper
Speaker 1: and inc In eighteen sixty four, he and his friend
Speaker 1: Samuel W. So Leigh received a patent for a machine
Speaker 1: that would number pages. After inventing that, a colleague suggested
Speaker 1: that he might make a device similar to Pratt's Tarot type,
Speaker 1: something that could print not just numbers, but letters onto paper.
Speaker 1: Pratt had already worked on mechanical systems that would advance
Speaker 1: the position of a piece of paper so that you
Speaker 1: could type a series of symbols on the paper without
Speaker 1: them all being piled on top of each other. In
Speaker 1: other words, he created these these mechanical devices that would
Speaker 1: advance the papers position and that way, if you were
Speaker 1: to type T, the paper would advance by one spot.
Speaker 1: You could type TEA again and it would be, you know,
Speaker 1: one spot to the right of the first one. So
Speaker 1: Shoal set out to create an evolved version of this technology.
Speaker 1: He took a slightly different approach when it came to
Speaker 1: the actual layout of keys. So first of all, he
Speaker 1: didn't have a split keyboard the way the parotype did.
Speaker 1: He grouped them all into four rows of keys, plus
Speaker 1: a space bar at the bottom of the rows. So
Speaker 1: the top row had the numerals two through nine, plus
Speaker 1: a dash. Like the pterotype, you were supposed to use
Speaker 1: I and O to stand in for one and zero.
Speaker 1: The second row had the vowels A, E, and I.
Speaker 1: Then you had a period, then you had a question mark,
Speaker 1: then you had why you oh, and the comma. The
Speaker 1: third row was B through M in alphabetical order, and
Speaker 1: the fourth row was Z through in in reverse alphabetical order.
Speaker 1: So if you were following along on row three, you
Speaker 1: would just go down at the far right and then
Speaker 1: move right to left to continue the alphabet, which I
Speaker 1: admit sounds really strange to us, but if you take
Speaker 1: a look at the modern keyboard, you realize that these
Speaker 1: letters are all in one crazy kind of order. Him
Speaker 1: A right. When Remington's bought the rights to Shulz typewriter
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy three, the company made a couple of changes,
Speaker 1: getting a little closer to the order that we're familiar
Speaker 1: with today with the quirty letters. That's Q W, E
Speaker 1: R T Y in the second row, the first letters
Speaker 1: in the second row beneath numbers two through nine, a dash,
Speaker 1: a common an underscore, and the layout of the letters
Speaker 1: is pretty similar to what you would see in a
Speaker 1: modern keyboard today, though the M was in a different place,
Speaker 1: as it would be found to the right of the
Speaker 1: L key and next to the N key at the
Speaker 1: bottom row. Where the M is on modern keyboards was
Speaker 1: actually a question mark, like where did the M go? Oh,
Speaker 1: it's up there. The quirty keyboard became a standard around two,
Speaker 1: fittingly with the Remington's standard typewriter number two. The story
Speaker 1: I hear is that the reason for the changes, we're
Speaker 1: moving the M key down to the last row all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. That wasn't to make the keyboard
Speaker 1: more efficient or to avoid issues with typewriters jamming. It was,
Speaker 1: according to the story, an effort to avoid having to
Speaker 1: pay royalties too Shoals After all, the keyboard was laid
Speaker 1: out in different way, so it can't be Shoals design.
Speaker 1: Now I should add that while I have heard this story,
Speaker 1: I've never seen any definitive proof that this was actually
Speaker 1: the reason why the Remington's Standard Number two keyboard was
Speaker 1: slightly different from shoals Is design. May have turned out
Speaker 1: that the folks at Remington's were just continuing to tweak
Speaker 1: the key layout to get the best arrangement. Anyway, as
Speaker 1: I said, this is when the M key migrated down
Speaker 1: to be next to the N key. As for the
Speaker 1: reason of the layout, well, that's one of those stories
Speaker 1: that has a lot of mythology behind it. But the
Speaker 1: commonly told story is that old typewriters, which were purely
Speaker 1: mechanical inventions, had issues with type bars jamming. Once type
Speaker 1: has got pretty fast, it typing the most common letters.
Speaker 1: Then if those letters were too close together, or if
Speaker 1: type has got too fast, then the bars would collide
Speaker 1: with one another and jam up the machine. Because you
Speaker 1: have to remember these were purely mechanical systems. The keys
Speaker 1: were essentially connected to levers that would power a type
Speaker 1: bar to strike the you know, usually an inked ribbon
Speaker 1: and then print a letter onto a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: So with that in mind, if you were typing super
Speaker 1: fast and a bunch of these type bars were coming
Speaker 1: up to that center spot at once, they could get
Speaker 1: caught in each other and then the machine jams. So
Speaker 1: that's the story that goes that that the reason the
Speaker 1: keyboard was laid out was purposefully to slow people down
Speaker 1: and to make sure that very uh frequently used letters
Speaker 1: wouldn't be in positions that would cause jams. However, there
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be any definitive support for that theory.
Speaker 1: Now it may have been coincidentally true, but generally the
Speaker 1: thinking is that Shoals and the folks at Remington's got
Speaker 1: feedback from various users, many of them telegraph operators, and
Speaker 1: the tweaks they made were based on that feedback. And
Speaker 1: this was before anyone had developed a touch typing method.
Speaker 1: So maybe it was because of jamming. Maybe it was
Speaker 1: just that typists were discovering that certain keys were just
Speaker 1: not an ideal position for typing. It doesn't stop numerous
Speaker 1: sites and videos and even this podcast once upon a
Speaker 1: time from repeating that the real answer was because type
Speaker 1: is typists were jamming machines, and that's why we have
Speaker 1: a quarty keyboard and it's completely outdated and we should
Speaker 1: change it. We just don't know that that's actually true.
Speaker 1: It might be, but we can't say for certain. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we can say that the modern keyboard layout can trace
Speaker 1: its origins to around eight two, so the keys haven't
Speaker 1: really changed in nearly a century and a half for
Speaker 1: quarity keyboards for the English speaking world, which is pretty wild,
Speaker 1: isn't it. And now we have all sorts of different
Speaker 1: versions of the keyboard, from the physical keyboard that I
Speaker 1: typed my notes on for these shows, two on screen
Speaker 1: keyboards for stuff like smartphone. Now let's skip ahead a
Speaker 1: little bit. The typewriter became a popular type of technology,
Speaker 1: with several companies popping up to compete against each other.
Speaker 1: You had Remington's, you had Underwood, Oliver, Corona Royal, and
Speaker 1: many more. If you want to learn more about those,
Speaker 1: just ask Tom Hanks. I understand he collects old typewriters. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we're going to jump ahead to the nineteen tens. In
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, that's when a man named James Smathers decided
Speaker 1: to advance typewriter technology. While it was possible to type
Speaker 1: up a message in much less time than it took
Speaker 1: to write things out by hand, presuming that you are
Speaker 1: a fairly accomplished typist, that is, the experience could be exhausting,
Speaker 1: particularly if you were typing all day, because you would
Speaker 1: feel it. Because again, to to create the impression on
Speaker 1: the paper, to stamp that letter onto a piece of paper,
Speaker 1: you had to strike the keys with enough force to
Speaker 1: move the type bar up to hit that inked ribbon
Speaker 1: and leave a letter on the paper. So if you've
Speaker 1: ever used an old like mechanical typewriter, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. I used to have an old underwood
Speaker 1: and typing on that thing was exhausting after a couple
Speaker 1: of pages. But hey, what if we turned to technology
Speaker 1: to do some of that work for us? What if
Speaker 1: striking a key didn't connect to a mechanical system but
Speaker 1: an electronic one. That was Smather's idea. He was working
Speaker 1: on one in the early nineteen tens and he got
Speaker 1: a patent for his invention By nineteen twelve. Now we're
Speaker 1: reaching the point where the keys don't connect to a
Speaker 1: mechanical lever that strikes the page, but are rather electronic switches,
Speaker 1: and this transition would carry over to computer keyboards. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six, we got a serious challenge to the
Speaker 1: quirty keyboard. August Dvorak and his brother in law, William Deely,
Speaker 1: received a patent for a new layout of keys. At
Speaker 1: this point, quirty was widely adopted throughout the industry, though
Speaker 1: you would occasionally find keyboards that had some slight differences
Speaker 1: in a few of the keys, but for the majority
Speaker 1: of the keys, the layout was pretty much established. Dvorak
Speaker 1: wanted to increase typing efficiency, which would mean reducing what
Speaker 1: he called hurdling or jumping over a key for common
Speaker 1: two letter combinations. In his mind, you know, very common
Speaker 1: two letter combinations should either be split up between right
Speaker 1: and left fingers, or they should be right next to
Speaker 1: each other. But you shouldn't have to hurdle over and
Speaker 1: jump across a different key in order to get to
Speaker 1: the second letter of a two letter combination. Something that's
Speaker 1: really common in English so uh. In the Dvorak keyboard,
Speaker 1: he lays out the vowels of A, O, E, U,
Speaker 1: and I in that order, from left to right on
Speaker 1: the third row of keys, So the top row remains
Speaker 1: the numbers and symbols, the second row is P, Y, F, G,
Speaker 1: C R, L, and then some other symbols and so on,
Speaker 1: and you can get Divorat keyboards to this day. You
Speaker 1: can even remap keys in various programs and use a
Speaker 1: standard quirty keyboard, but use the Divorac layout within the computer.
Speaker 1: Now that means you might want to put some stickers
Speaker 1: and all your keys to relabel them so you can
Speaker 1: actually learn the Divorac system. Early claims about divor X
Speaker 1: keyboard said the system was easier to learn and master
Speaker 1: than the quirty keyboard, and that typists could reach and
Speaker 1: surpass the speeds that they could hit with Quirty after
Speaker 1: just a few days practice. Subsequent investigation found that these
Speaker 1: early claims may have been at best exaggerated, but there
Speaker 1: are people who strongly prefer the Divorac layout, and that
Speaker 1: includes some people who absolutely swear that the original Divorax
Speaker 1: study the Navy's studies were perfectly cromulent, and that these
Speaker 1: subsequent studies that seemed to debunk the original one were
Speaker 1: flawed and possibly fueled by some sort of big Corty
Speaker 1: slush fund or something. I'm not really clear on the details. Now.
Speaker 1: I've never used a Dvorak keyboard, having learned on the
Speaker 1: puirty and never really tried anything else, so I can't
Speaker 1: really comment on it. I can say that there are
Speaker 1: a lot of anecdotes. I don't know about any actual,
Speaker 1: like evidence based accounts, but there are a lot of
Speaker 1: anecdotes that say that the divorate keyboard results in less
Speaker 1: exhaustion and and fewer repetitive stress injuries and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, like it's arguably healthier to type on a
Speaker 1: divorate keyboard than a quirty keyboard. But I haven't found
Speaker 1: anything that definitively says that. It's all, like I said, anecdotal.
Speaker 1: And of course I'm focusing on keyboards for English speaking
Speaker 1: countries here. Keyboards for other countries can look quite a
Speaker 1: bit different, with different numbers of keys and key combinations
Speaker 1: to make various characters, but at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: they're all keyboards. When we come back, I'll talk about
Speaker 1: some of the different styles of keyboards and what makes
Speaker 1: them tick, or really, in some cases at least click.
Speaker 1: But first, let's take a quick break. For most, but
Speaker 1: not all keyboards, there exists underneath the keys a grid
Speaker 1: of circuits called the key matrix. This is where keyboard
Speaker 1: Neo and Morpheus and Trinity fight. Keyboard agent Smith. Hang on,
Speaker 1: wait now, I'm being told off Mike that I got
Speaker 1: that wrong. Apparently the key matrix is a grid of circuits,
Speaker 1: and if you aren't pressing down on any keys, all
Speaker 1: the circuits are open. I mean there's no signal flowing
Speaker 1: through them because there's a break in the circuit. Right,
Speaker 1: there's not a complete circuit, so a current cannot flow
Speaker 1: through it. Pressing down on a key activates a switch
Speaker 1: that closes the circuit and allows a weak signal to
Speaker 1: pass through. That signal travels to a processor within the
Speaker 1: keyboard itself, which registers which key or keys were pressed.
Speaker 1: If you hold the key down, the processor will detect
Speaker 1: that as pressing the key repeatedly. At least with most keyboards,
Speaker 1: this is essentially a mechanical keyboard, but there are several
Speaker 1: subtypes of mechanical keyboards, and the thing they have in
Speaker 1: common is that they all activate a switch to complete
Speaker 1: a circuit. So let's tackle these in turn. You've got
Speaker 1: your rubber dome keyboards. Underneath the keys, there's a pattern
Speaker 1: of small rubber domes that are flexible, but they have
Speaker 1: a hard center made out of carbon typically, and it
Speaker 1: looks a little bit like bubble wrap. When you push
Speaker 1: down on a key, the key pushes down on the dome,
Speaker 1: causing it to squish, and the carbon center presses down
Speaker 1: to complete the circuit. So every single letter, every single number,
Speaker 1: every single symbol has one of these little domes over
Speaker 1: its individual little switch. When you let go of the
Speaker 1: key causes the dome to move back to its original
Speaker 1: dome shape and the key moves back up. The keyboards
Speaker 1: are pretty cheap. They also do it fairly decent job
Speaker 1: at protecting keyboards from spills because there's effectively a rubber
Speaker 1: sheet covering the circuitry. But I think most folks don't
Speaker 1: really imagine these when they think of a mechanical keyboard.
Speaker 1: Some of the dome based keyboards have a mechanism called
Speaker 1: a scissor switch. This is a pair of plastic pieces
Speaker 1: on either side of the key that look like scissors,
Speaker 1: thus the name. They act as sort of a spring.
Speaker 1: So the scissor switch style keyboards require less distance to
Speaker 1: go from the key being up to being depressed as
Speaker 1: it pushed down, not as in Feeling Blue. They tend
Speaker 1: to be a little more quiet than other types of keyboards,
Speaker 1: and they have a lower profile, you know, they don't
Speaker 1: have to be raised up as high. So these are
Speaker 1: the types of keyboards you find in laptops pretty frequently.
Speaker 1: The laptop that I have in front of me, the
Speaker 1: one I typed my notes on for this show, has
Speaker 1: this type of keyboard. There's still a dome under the keys,
Speaker 1: but the keys don't require much worse to press down,
Speaker 1: nor do they go as far from a pure dome
Speaker 1: based mechanical keyboard perspective. Similar to that type of keyboard
Speaker 1: our membrane keyboards. These have a membrane that on the underside,
Speaker 1: the side that's facing the circuitry has a pattern printed
Speaker 1: on it, and pressing on a key pushes the membrane
Speaker 1: against the circuitry, which completes the circuit at that point
Speaker 1: or points. There are membrane keyboards that are totally flexible,
Speaker 1: the kind that often come with stuff like tablet computers,
Speaker 1: you know, like the rollable keyboards and stuff. They don't
Speaker 1: have the clicky tactile response you get with other mechanical keyboards.
Speaker 1: That's one of the reasons I don't really like this
Speaker 1: kind of keyboard because it's hard to tell from touch
Speaker 1: if the computer has registered the key press, and if
Speaker 1: you're not looking at, you know, the screen where the
Speaker 1: text is appearing, that can be a problem. Like I
Speaker 1: can sometimes be typing notes while looking at a source
Speaker 1: so I'm not looking directly at my document. I'm looking
Speaker 1: at the source material and I'm making sure I'm getting
Speaker 1: like dates, write and stuff. But that means that if
Speaker 1: I'm typing by touch and I can't tell if the
Speaker 1: key strike I just did was registered or not, i
Speaker 1: might look at my notes and see that I've got
Speaker 1: a ton of typos there because some of my key
Speaker 1: strokes just didn't get registered. That's something that's irritating to me.
Speaker 1: That's why I don't like membrane keyboards. However, they are
Speaker 1: super cheap, so they are incredibly affordable. The other two
Speaker 1: major types of mechanical keyboards are similar and that they
Speaker 1: both have spring loaded keys, so a spring holds them
Speaker 1: in position. That you have metal contact keys, which as
Speaker 1: the name suggests, have a metal contact on the underside
Speaker 1: of the key itself, so pressing the key compresses the spring.
Speaker 1: It brings the metal contact into you know, contact with
Speaker 1: the circuit, thus completing it at that point and letting
Speaker 1: go of the key lets the spring expand back to
Speaker 1: its normal size. Uh. Those tend to be really clicky
Speaker 1: kind of keys. It's what I think most people associate
Speaker 1: with mechanical keyboards, that clicky, clacky kind of thing. Then
Speaker 1: you've got foam element keys, which are really pretty much
Speaker 1: the same as the middle contacts, but of course instead
Speaker 1: of having a metal contact under the key, there's a
Speaker 1: piece of spongey foam that pushes down on the medal
Speaker 1: strip that then makes contact with the circuit. Like I said,
Speaker 1: these keyboards have the real mechanical clickiness to them, and
Speaker 1: a lot of gamers like these types of keyboards. They
Speaker 1: feel that that tactle response gives them the confidence they
Speaker 1: need when they're making a lot of quick moves and games.
Speaker 1: You know, their eyes are on the screen, so they
Speaker 1: need to feel confident that when they've pressed a key
Speaker 1: that it means something. So that click is kind of
Speaker 1: a confirmation that, yeah, you did hit that button to
Speaker 1: open the door or pick up an inventory item or
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. Now, there is one other type
Speaker 1: of keyboard I need to mention that is different from
Speaker 1: these others that I've talked about, and those are capacitive keyboards.
Speaker 1: So and the or keyboards, pushing a key completes a circuit,
Speaker 1: but with capacitive keyboards there's already a complete circuit. So
Speaker 1: pushing down on a key brings a tiny conductive plate
Speaker 1: into close contact with another tiny conductive plate that's actually
Speaker 1: attached to the circuit itself. So when these two plates
Speaker 1: get really close to each other, it changes the amount
Speaker 1: of current that's flowing through that part of the circuit
Speaker 1: just slightly, and the keyboards processor detects that change in
Speaker 1: current and registers that as a keystroke. I just think
Speaker 1: that it's neat in the way that most keyboards detective
Speaker 1: touch is kind of but not really the opposite. Now,
Speaker 1: the processor's job is to detect keypresses and then to
Speaker 1: relay which key presses were made and in what order
Speaker 1: to the computer. The detection requires the processor to do
Speaker 1: a little clean up work first, because pressing a key
Speaker 1: creates an oscillating effect, meaning that while you might press
Speaker 1: one key one time, there will be tiny oscillations that
Speaker 1: will make it seem like that key had been pressed many, many,
Speaker 1: many times per second. The processor can detect the changes
Speaker 1: in current and then it kind of weeds out these
Speaker 1: oscillations and determines the actual keystroke. This is sometimes called
Speaker 1: de bouncing, as the processors essentially filtering out those oscillations
Speaker 1: or bounces. The processor actually has a small memory buffer
Speaker 1: to store data before sending it on, and then on
Speaker 1: the computer side, you've got the keyboard controller, which receives
Speaker 1: and processes data sent from the keyboard. This information then
Speaker 1: goes on to the operating system. The computer can have
Speaker 1: another filter that maps keystrokes to specific outcomes, including for
Speaker 1: those times when you might be using, say an English
Speaker 1: keyboard to type in a non English language that has
Speaker 1: characters that English just doesn't have, or if you were
Speaker 1: to say, use a quirty keyboard but use a divorac
Speaker 1: layout within a computer program. Computer keyboards and video displays
Speaker 1: have been a thing since nineteen sixties, and a thing
Speaker 1: in consumer computers since the late nineteen seventies. Something that
Speaker 1: hit the consumer market a little bit later was the
Speaker 1: computer mouse, but these days, it's pretty much a standard
Speaker 1: component of computer setups, at least desktop ones. There are alternatives, obviously,
Speaker 1: like track pads and then the little racers style controllers
Speaker 1: that laptops have, but we're going to focus on the
Speaker 1: standard traditional computer mouse. The computer mouse is actually an
Speaker 1: invention that emerged from two different efforts, independent efforts. Now
Speaker 1: the one that most computer geeks know about is Doug Ingelbart,
Speaker 1: who was an engineer who worked at the Stanford Research Institute.
Speaker 1: These days we call that s r I International, and
Speaker 1: at Stanford, Ingelbart came up with this idea for a
Speaker 1: device that could act as a pointer for computer so stems,
Speaker 1: allowing the user to indicate a specific point on a
Speaker 1: computer screen where they wished to do something such as
Speaker 1: move a cursor so that they could input text at
Speaker 1: that point. There were other devices that did that sort
Speaker 1: of thing, like track balls and light pins, but ingle
Speaker 1: Bart wanted something that was precise and after maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit of practice, very easy to use. So his
Speaker 1: solution was a computer mouse. But it was a little
Speaker 1: different from most early computer mouse gadgets we had back
Speaker 1: in the eighties. Ingle Bart's design had two wheels on
Speaker 1: the bottom, one was aligned for the x axis of
Speaker 1: movement and one was aligned for the y axis. So
Speaker 1: if you're looking from above at a computer mouse pad,
Speaker 1: you would say one of them was for left right movement,
Speaker 1: one was for up down movement. So essentially you had
Speaker 1: two wheels mounted at ninety degrees from one another. Users
Speaker 1: would see their movements with this device represented on screen.
Speaker 1: So if you were making motions with your hand on
Speaker 1: one plane that was approximately ninety degrees off from the
Speaker 1: plane of a computer monitor, uh, you could do that. Now,
Speaker 1: this is something that folks pick up pretty darn fast.
Speaker 1: I'm sure all of you have had experience working with
Speaker 1: a computer mouse, and before long it becomes totally natural.
Speaker 1: That still blows my mind. It shows the amazing plasticity
Speaker 1: of the human brain that we can see what we
Speaker 1: need to do on a screen and then make the
Speaker 1: appropriate movements with a device connected to our hand that's
Speaker 1: in a totally different plane, a plane that's off by
Speaker 1: ninety degrees from what we're looking at. That's just neat
Speaker 1: to me. I guess I'm easily impressed. Inglebart spoke about
Speaker 1: this computer mouse idea at a lecture in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. Within s r I. He and an engineer
Speaker 1: named Bill English worked on making a prototype device. So
Speaker 1: the first computer mouse from the pair was made out
Speaker 1: of wood. At least the main body of the mouse
Speaker 1: was made out of wood, and it had a small
Speaker 1: red button on the top that acted as your mouse button.
Speaker 1: And Inglebart didn't call it a mouse at that point.
Speaker 1: That was a term that would arise later, and the
Speaker 1: actual origins for it are kind of lost to history.
Speaker 1: Inglebart said, I don't know who said it first. People
Speaker 1: just said it kind of looks like a mouse with
Speaker 1: a tail, and it kind of got the name that way.
Speaker 1: But we don't have like a definitive date where we
Speaker 1: can say this was when the term was coined. But
Speaker 1: I did say the computer mouse emerged from a couple
Speaker 1: of different places. The other place was Germany at Telefunken,
Speaker 1: which was a TV and radio component company, and I'll
Speaker 1: have to do a full episode about that company. At
Speaker 1: some point engineers came up with a similar idea to
Speaker 1: Inglebart's device. While Inglebart had already spoken about the computer
Speaker 1: mouse and applied for a patent for it in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, his invention was not widely known outside of
Speaker 1: some fairly small circles. At the same time, the German
Speaker 1: engineers were creating their own version, and it was much
Speaker 1: closer to the computer mouse that we had from the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. So these engineers used a rolling ball rather
Speaker 1: than a pair of wheels for their mouse. So the
Speaker 1: computer mouse was in effect a track ball, but upside down.
Speaker 1: So while you would use your hand to roll a
Speaker 1: track ball which would otherwise stay stationary, and it would
Speaker 1: activate sensors that would measure the movement and translate that
Speaker 1: into cursor movements on the screen, the German mouse did
Speaker 1: this with you moving the mouse around and the roller
Speaker 1: ball would roll across you know, your desk surface. The
Speaker 1: ball meant you only needed one rolling component because the
Speaker 1: ball could roll along either the X or the y
Speaker 1: axis and technically all the stuff in between as well.
Speaker 1: Inglebart's invention gets the most attention, largely because it played
Speaker 1: a part in a famous demonstration in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: often called the Mother of all demos. This was a
Speaker 1: presentation to the Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of
Speaker 1: Electrical and Electronics Engineer Years. The demo was essentially a
Speaker 1: laundry list of all the types of stuff we would
Speaker 1: consider standard in computers. Decades later, Inglebart showed off stuff
Speaker 1: like hypertext, that is text within a document that links
Speaker 1: to another document or a section of a document. He
Speaker 1: showed off collaborative simultaneous editing software, video conferencing. He showed
Speaker 1: off the computer mouse obviously, and also the g u
Speaker 1: I or graphical user interface like Windows or the Mac
Speaker 1: operating system. Some members of Inglebart's team would in following
Speaker 1: years migrate over to work at the Xerox Palo Alto
Speaker 1: Research Center or Park. This group produced a computer that
Speaker 1: was never sold commercially, but it did feature a window
Speaker 1: to operating system and a computer mouse as a navigational
Speaker 1: tool for the machine. A certain Steve Jobs visited Park
Speaker 1: and saw a demonstration of this device and mysterio see
Speaker 1: The Apple Macintosh line of computers began to take on
Speaker 1: some of those characteristics a few years later. Similarly, Microsoft
Speaker 1: would get to work on its own g u I
Speaker 1: that would require the use of a mouse. The Macintosh
Speaker 1: debuted in nineteen eighty four, and it didn't take very
Speaker 1: long for the computer mouse to become standard equipment on
Speaker 1: computers after that. Microsoft Windows first launched in night five,
Speaker 1: though the first version didn't get much traction, and so
Speaker 1: most PC users were still sticking with DOSS. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until nineteen nineties Windows three point oh that the operating
Speaker 1: system really started to gain ground. And of course, these days,
Speaker 1: a lot of computer mousees mices my my anyway, a
Speaker 1: lot of them are optical. So gone are the roller
Speaker 1: balls that you would occasionally have to pop out of
Speaker 1: the mouse and then clean. Those are pretty much gone now.
Speaker 1: Most of the ones we used today are effectively a
Speaker 1: very small sled that we push around on the surface
Speaker 1: and underneath there's an optical sensor that detects motion. Um.
Speaker 1: But it's obviously the same general concept, it's just a
Speaker 1: different way of accomplishing it. Now. When we come back,
Speaker 1: I'll talk about a few other types of input devices
Speaker 1: that we currently use for computers, and then chat about
Speaker 1: why we haven't migrated from the keyboard and mouse, even
Speaker 1: though it's been around for decades. But first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break. So one of the input devices I've
Speaker 1: already mentioned is the track ball, which is like the
Speaker 1: old rollerball mouse gadget turned upside down. We're gonna skip
Speaker 1: over that one, but you get the point. Then you
Speaker 1: have other input devices like we had light pens those
Speaker 1: predate the computer mouse. This was another way to control
Speaker 1: cursor placement. The earliest light pens were tethered to computers
Speaker 1: with cables, and while it was a bit more efficient
Speaker 1: than trying to maneuver a cursor using keyboard keys, it
Speaker 1: wasn't exactly convenient. Essentially, a light pin is a kind
Speaker 1: of specialized optical sensor. It picks up the changes of
Speaker 1: brightness for a small group of pixels. This was in
Speaker 1: the day of cathode ray tube or CRT computer monitors,
Speaker 1: and the way CRT monitors work is that you have
Speaker 1: an electron gun that's on the inside of the monitor,
Speaker 1: so it's behind the screen, and it's effectively painting the
Speaker 1: screen pixel by pixel, crossing the screen and horizontal lines
Speaker 1: from top to bottom. So the light pen would pick
Speaker 1: up the timing of when a specific group of pixels
Speaker 1: would change in brightness. And because it's connected directly to
Speaker 1: the computer, the computer could interpret where the light pen
Speaker 1: was in relation to the overall screen because the computer
Speaker 1: knows quote unquote where the electron beam is at any
Speaker 1: given moment. This created an incredibly precise method for interacting
Speaker 1: with text on screen. But just as find it inconvenient
Speaker 1: to use touch screen displays for desktop computers, so do
Speaker 1: people find light pens a bit tiresome to use. It
Speaker 1: can also lead to repetitive stress injuries. The computer mouse
Speaker 1: would end up being much more comfortable, and so in
Speaker 1: many but not all applications, the mouse would replace the
Speaker 1: light pen. Then we have graphic tablets, which see a
Speaker 1: lot of use today for various purposes, including creating digital art.
Speaker 1: Uh those are not terribly different from light pens. It
Speaker 1: works on a different principle, but like the idea of
Speaker 1: using a physical pen device or stylus to create a
Speaker 1: digital representation of something, that is what is not new.
Speaker 1: Of course, we also have touch screens, which allow us
Speaker 1: to interface with computer devices through touch. There are a
Speaker 1: couple of different versions of that. Capacitive touch screens are
Speaker 1: usually those are like the most common these days. And
Speaker 1: then we also had software designed to detect and interpret handwriting,
Speaker 1: which had a pretty rough start in the early days.
Speaker 1: It was a main selling point for the infamous Apple
Speaker 1: Newton line of devices, but the early versions of the
Speaker 1: Newton had finnicky handwriting recognition capabilities, which resulted in a
Speaker 1: lot of errors to me, I think it's funny that
Speaker 1: the Newton and then later you know, personal digital assistance
Speaker 1: like the Palm pilots, they were effectively looking for a
Speaker 1: way to let people use handwriting to take notes on
Speaker 1: a digital device. Now, the reason I find it funny
Speaker 1: is that one of the big reasons folks like Shoals
Speaker 1: way back in the eighteen hundreds were working on creating
Speaker 1: typewriters in the first place was to let people quote
Speaker 1: unquote write faster than they would if they were to
Speaker 1: do it by hand. So, in other words, we went
Speaker 1: from creating the keyboard form factor in order to make
Speaker 1: it easier and faster to write by uh, you know,
Speaker 1: using these keys, to creating handwriting recognition software and a
Speaker 1: stylus interface in order to move away from keyboards him
Speaker 1: back to writing now. To be fair, the foreign factor
Speaker 1: for handheld devices means that incorporating keyboards that are easy
Speaker 1: to use is challenging. If it's a physical keyboard that
Speaker 1: impacts the size of the device, including its thickness. If
Speaker 1: it's an on screen keyboard, you have to be, you know,
Speaker 1: really good at touch detection and error correction to avoid
Speaker 1: creating a frustrating user experience, so I get why developers
Speaker 1: were doing this. It's just funny to me that you
Speaker 1: had people like Schul saying, we need a better way
Speaker 1: to write. How about we take the pens out of
Speaker 1: people's hands and replace it with keys, And then you
Speaker 1: had a couple of generations later engineers saying we need
Speaker 1: a better way to write. We need to take the
Speaker 1: keys away and put a pen back in people's hands.
Speaker 1: Just kind of cyclical, I guess. For decades, one of
Speaker 1: the sci fi visions of the future is a world
Speaker 1: in which we interact with computers through voice commands, and
Speaker 1: we definitely have laid the groundwork with this. Voice recognition
Speaker 1: is a complicated discipline. It's a subset of artificial and eligence,
Speaker 1: and it took a long time to get it to
Speaker 1: a level of precision that's, you know, mostly reliable. So
Speaker 1: today we've got various smartphones, smart speakers, smart watches, computer
Speaker 1: systems that can accept voice commands. However, despite all that,
Speaker 1: some of our more involved tasks with computers tend to
Speaker 1: be best reserved for a keyboard and mouse. For example,
Speaker 1: when I type up my notes for episodes, I definitely
Speaker 1: type them up I could I guess dictate notes to
Speaker 1: my computer. But the process of thinking what I need
Speaker 1: to type and then typing it is a little different
Speaker 1: from the experience of thinking what I want to say
Speaker 1: and then speaking it. My composition would change, the nature
Speaker 1: of my notes would change. Uh, it's just you know,
Speaker 1: a different approach to creating and then processing and recording thoughts.
Speaker 1: I guess I could write down my notes and then
Speaker 1: dictate it, but then I'm just doubling my work. Actually
Speaker 1: I'm tripling it because then have to record it again
Speaker 1: for you guys. So maybe one day I'll give it
Speaker 1: a shot and just see if I can, you know,
Speaker 1: extemporaneously speak into a microphone and take notes that way
Speaker 1: for an episode, you know, researching stuff and then speaking
Speaker 1: in and just wing it from there. That would be
Speaker 1: an interesting experiment. I don't know that it would be
Speaker 1: a good episode, but it would be an experimental one. Um.
Speaker 1: But voice recognition voice to text it tends to be
Speaker 1: a little clunky, which is not helped by the fact
Speaker 1: that if you want to add punctuation, typically you have
Speaker 1: to say it period. That's kind of a joke. Then
Speaker 1: we have just your control systems. Video game consoles have
Speaker 1: tried pushing this a lot. You've got gadgets like the
Speaker 1: Nintendo we which allowed for emotion controls while players were
Speaker 1: holding various controllers and then making physical motions with them.
Speaker 1: PlayStation and Xbox have both experimented with cameras and optical
Speaker 1: sensor basis stems, as well as voice activation for alternative controls,
Speaker 1: but even in these specific implementations, the technologies have seen
Speaker 1: limited success. Then you've got eye tracking solutions. These can
Speaker 1: be incredibly important from an accessibility standpoint. They can allow
Speaker 1: people who might not otherwise be able to work a
Speaker 1: keyboard or use voice activation, be able to you know,
Speaker 1: interact with a computer system and they direct their eyes
Speaker 1: to specific points on a screen, which the system tracks.
Speaker 1: Eye tracking can be used in combination of multiple other
Speaker 1: input devices in order to augment the experience. But there's
Speaker 1: also a privacy concern with this approach, as it means
Speaker 1: that the computer can track where you're looking, and it
Speaker 1: can record how long you're looking there. So for a
Speaker 1: company that you know, makes this money through advertising, like
Speaker 1: Facebook or Google, that could be incredibly valuable information that
Speaker 1: starts to feel a little invasive. However, that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that eye tracking technology is inherently bad, It just depends
Speaker 1: upon the implement mevation of the tech. For certain applications
Speaker 1: such as VR and a R, it would be useful
Speaker 1: to have alternatives to keyboards and computer mouse, and many
Speaker 1: of these use cases the user might not have a
Speaker 1: clear view of a keyboarder mouse, so something that doesn't
Speaker 1: depend upon you know, being able to to see and
Speaker 1: then touch keyboard or mouse would be really handy. You
Speaker 1: can use specialized controllers to get around some of this,
Speaker 1: but again, if you were going to engage in any
Speaker 1: task that's more involved than the relatively narrow range of
Speaker 1: commands you would use for say a video game, you
Speaker 1: would start to hit some challenges. Now that's not to
Speaker 1: say that various engineers and inventors haven't tried to create
Speaker 1: alternatives to the classic keyboard. There are several different incarnations
Speaker 1: of one handed keyboards out there. Those are meant to
Speaker 1: allow someone to type with one hand and then they
Speaker 1: can use their other hand to control a mouse and
Speaker 1: never have to switch. And from what I understand, the
Speaker 1: learning experience on these devices is somewhat challenging because you know,
Speaker 1: you can't typically have a full sized keyboard and expect
Speaker 1: someone to type on it with one hand. They tend
Speaker 1: to be smaller keyboards. That also means that creating every
Speaker 1: single character means you're gonna be using some combined keystrokes.
Speaker 1: For certain characters, there's just not you know, not enough
Speaker 1: keys to go around to represent all of them. That
Speaker 1: means you're using at least two fingers to create a
Speaker 1: single letter or number, depending upon the layout and design.
Speaker 1: There's also a one handed typing solution that gets rid
Speaker 1: of the keyboard entirely. There's a company called Tap that
Speaker 1: created a wearable keyboard and mouse substitute. So, okay, imagine
Speaker 1: you've got a glove. Let's say it's the right handed glove.
Speaker 1: Now imagine that you cut the fingers off the glove
Speaker 1: a little above the base at each finger, so you
Speaker 1: know you've got a little ring there. Now imagine that
Speaker 1: you cut away most of the rest of the glove.
Speaker 1: You only leave a bit of connected fabric betwe in
Speaker 1: each of the digits, including your thumb. Now you have
Speaker 1: these loops, these connected loops that you can fit over
Speaker 1: your thumb and fingers. Now imagine that you attach some
Speaker 1: sensors to each of those little rings of fabric, and
Speaker 1: you kind of have what the tap system is. So
Speaker 1: what TAP does is register finger taps against any other
Speaker 1: surface like a desk or a table, or your leg
Speaker 1: or whatever, and different finger combinations will produce different characters.
Speaker 1: So the typical human hand has five fingers, right, and
Speaker 1: we've got twenty six letters in the English alphabet, Plus
Speaker 1: we have numerals zero through nine, so ten of those,
Speaker 1: plus numerous punctuation symbols and other symbols. So to be
Speaker 1: able to type each of those using a device that
Speaker 1: registers motion from a maximum of five digits means you've
Speaker 1: got to rely on a lot of finger combinations to
Speaker 1: make that happen. For example, if you wanted to type
Speaker 1: the letter C, you would have to type your thumb
Speaker 1: plus your last three fingers, leaving your index finger alone.
Speaker 1: That would be a C. If you wanted to do
Speaker 1: an H, it would be your four fingers but not
Speaker 1: your thumb that you would tap, and A would be
Speaker 1: just your index fingers. So, as you might imagine, the
Speaker 1: learning curve on this is a little steep because it
Speaker 1: requires a lot of pattern memorization. I'll say the videos
Speaker 1: of this thing are kind of neat, but I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that it's a better way to input information than
Speaker 1: a keyboard, but it could be a useful alternative input
Speaker 1: device for specific use cases. Now in the future, we're
Speaker 1: likely to see more brain computer interfaces. In fact, there
Speaker 1: are lots of companies working on this. Elon musk is
Speaker 1: gaga over it. We already have examples of these today,
Speaker 1: but in most cases they require invasive transcranial surgery in
Speaker 1: order to implant electrodes into the user's brain. Obviously, anytime
Speaker 1: you're talking about surgery there are medical risks, and when
Speaker 1: it comes to the blood brain barrier, the risks are
Speaker 1: super high. Infection would be deadly. So the test cases
Speaker 1: involving these interfaces have been restricted to people who are
Speaker 1: paraplegic but otherwise have few ways to interact with the
Speaker 1: world around them and tend to be heavily or entirely
Speaker 1: dependent upon caretakers. Brain computer interfaces have the potential to
Speaker 1: return some independence to people who have lives like that,
Speaker 1: which is incredible and much further down the road, such
Speaker 1: interfaces might change the way the rest of us interact
Speaker 1: with our devices. But to get there, we're likely going
Speaker 1: to need to have technologies that can accurately read brain
Speaker 1: waves safely without the need for surgery to make it happen.
Speaker 1: And we'll need applications that can work seamlessly with that
Speaker 1: sort of technology. And even then, we might still be
Speaker 1: using a keyboard and mouse for certain stuff like typing
Speaker 1: up a novel or whatever, so that we don't have
Speaker 1: some extraneous thoughts just intrude upon our narration. Something like
Speaker 1: this could happen. So imagine that I have written a novel.
Speaker 1: I warned you it will not be a good one,
Speaker 1: but here we go. So here's my novel, as if
Speaker 1: I were using a brain computer interface to type it.
Speaker 1: Jane's hand froze just before touching the door knob. What
Speaker 1: if she were wrong? Doubt seeped into her mind, taking
Speaker 1: hold and make sure you buy milk today because you're
Speaker 1: out of it. Plus I think the dog needs to
Speaker 1: go out. Wait did I type that? Am I still typing? Stop? Thinking?
Speaker 1: Stop and seen? So why do we still have the
Speaker 1: keyboard and mouse? Well, they've proven to be useful interface devices.
Speaker 1: I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There
Speaker 1: are certain tasks that keyboards tend to be the best
Speaker 1: tool for the job, at least so far. Now that
Speaker 1: does not mean it will always be that way. Maybe
Speaker 1: someone will come up with an input method that's more efficient,
Speaker 1: more accurate, and easier to use than a keyboard, but
Speaker 1: it hasn't happened yet, at least not for intense uses
Speaker 1: like typing out a novel or the notes to a podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm interested to hear what you think about various interfaces,
Speaker 1: whether or not we will ever abandon the keyboard and mouse,
Speaker 1: or if they're just here to stay. Maybe that's just
Speaker 1: gonna be a legacy technology that remains useful for as
Speaker 1: long as we're using computers the way we do. Or
Speaker 1: maybe you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with me,
Speaker 1: the best way to do that is over on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Drop me a line. The handle we use for the
Speaker 1: show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart
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