Shift Happens newsletter

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Two days until the end of the Kickstarter campaign!

Hello, friends!

I’m finding Kickstarter kind of funny, because it separates milestones in strange ways. A successful Kickstarter is better than a failed one, of course, but a Kickstarter being finished doesn’t mean the books are in people’s hands quite yet. Stretch goals and initial funding muddle things even further. Are you supposed to quarter-celebrate each time around? Just wait until everything is shipped?

I don’t actually know. But in the meantime, here we are, close to yet another milestone: The Kickstarter campaign for Shift Happens has only about 60 hours more to go! Yes, it’s over 400% funded, which is honestly incredible, and it’s the second book in the history of Kickstarter non-fiction publishing. We all know the book will get printed by October.

But we’re not quite done yet.

#39
March 7, 2023
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The cursed universes of Dana Sibera

The Kickstarter for Shift Happens still has 10 days to go.

Please help us get to $700,000 and unlock a free nice colorful third-volume for everyone by backing and spreading the word!

And now for something completely different…

⌘

#38
February 27, 2023
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The big things and the small things from the last two days

If you backed the book, you have seen some – but not nearly all – of this in my first (!) backer update.

The campaign update

state.png

The Kickstarter campaign was funded within the first two hours, and at this time it’s very close to being 300% funded, which is incredible. This means the book will definitely get printed – as a matter of fact, the printer is excited, too – and if more people back, the book could automatically become nicer for everybody owing to economies of scale!

#37
February 9, 2023
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The Kickstarter for Shift Happens is live!

Online copy.jpg

Kickstarter

I just pressed the Enter key at the right place, and the Kickstarter for my book went live.

I hope you find it valuable and entertaining, and enticing enough to click on one of the tiers and then, too, press Enter at the right place. (Or use your mouse or finger, I guess, if you’re like that.)

#36
February 7, 2023
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Kickstarter launches in a week + Launch livestream details

launch-cover.jpg

The Kickstarter for the book will launch on Tuesday, February 7, at 9am Pacific! I will send another email before so you won’t miss it, but you can also bookmark the Kickstarter page (although at this moment it is not particularly exciting).

There will also be a livestream at 11am Pacific (2pm east coast time, 7pm London time) the same day. I will be joined by Robin Rendle – a designer, typographer, and one of my favourite design thinkers – to talk about the book, the stories within, the keyboards I met along the way, and what the whole project means to me!

For those interested, we might also later go into the process of putting the book together and more details – I want to screen share some stuff and even perhaps try to assemble part of the book using my strange scripts.

#35
February 1, 2023
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The monkey lives

Happy New Year!

The website for the book is ready at shifthappens.site. I’m really excited about it:

  • you can see what the book is going to look like exactly

  • you can learn so much more about what’s inside

  • if you were wondering what the chapter names were all about, wonder no more!

  • there are a few small games at the bottom (with more to come)

  • you can learn more about what this book means to me

  • and a few other things!

I’m very happy with how this turned out. Please, check it out, send me your feedback, and tell your friends and even selected enemies.

#34
January 3, 2023
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A man walks into a progress bar

I’ve printed many versions of the book before using print on demand, but what arrived last week feels so much more important. It’s the first test from the actual printer in Maine I’m going to employ.

#33
December 23, 2022
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The trip to Spain: The bad parts

In the chronology of my Spanish trip going haywire, the hard drive dying came on May 5, after me getting COVID and after the cat sitter locked herself out of my apartment, but before an airline kicked me out of the airport despite following all the recovery rules, and before the second airline lost my luggage.

The drive was a relatively new four-terabyte SSD, and 75% of its contents were the 100,000+ files that encompass the book: the writing, the high-resolution photos, the typesetting, the database of keyboard stuff, all the newsletters and various mini projects. It was all there until one moment, without any warning, it wasn’t.

I won’t keep you in unnecessary suspense: there was no real danger. I backed everything up just before I left, and even the hard-to-replace photos I took earlier on the trip were immediately duplicated into sets put in different wallets and suitcases.

Still. I’ve done a million small things during the trip’s quieter evenings – photo processing, minute adjustments, tiny rewrites, and so on – and the notion of having to redo all of them felt daunting. Besides, I wasn’t sure I kept track of them all, and it’s a really unpleasant feeling to face something not being done while remembering having done it. (Or, don’t ever let Schrödinger and Zeigarnik have a baby!)

#32
December 11, 2022
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Some good news

I finally have some good news to share. We† found the right paper and the printer that knows what to do with it, and have all the verbal agreements we need. Things can go haywire still, but this is the current plan:

  • crowdsourcing (likely Kickstarter) in February 2023
  • printing over the summer
  • book publication in the late summer/fall 2023

I’ll tell you the complex story of the paper search later, but what’s exciting about this moment is also that I finally can start sharing some aspects of the book, because I no longer worry about them changing.

So let’s start with revealing the chapter list!

#31
November 15, 2022
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The soul of an old solenoid

There are some exciting new developments on the printer/paper front. If things go well, I’ll have something to announce next time! Please keep your fingers crossed.

Have you ever seen a pinball machine being scared?

Pinballs, already fascinating during their mechanical era, accelerated in complexity with the advent of microprocessors. Like many other things in the 1980s, pinballs too became computers, and this allowed them to reach new heights: music and digitized sound effects, small and then big animated screens, different play modes, remembering the state between players, and multiball.

#4
August 29, 2022
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The trip to Spain: The good parts

All of the linked photos are compressed, but they come in the original 42-megapixel resolution from my current camera. Yes, megapixel wars were and are stupid. But trust me, these are the *good* megapixels.
All of the linked photos are compressed, but they come in the original 42-megapixel resolution from my current camera. Yes, megapixel wars were and are stupid. But trust me, these are the *good* megapixels.

The famous saying goes “the best camera is the one you have on you,” but I keep changing my mind about what it means.

In the early days of my interest in photography, this felt simple. “The best camera is the one you have on you” meant “don’t forget to bring your camera.”

Then, as smartphones made it hard not to carry a camera, the saying morphed into: “any camera is better than none.” You might have left your point-and-shoot at home, but you can still capture something with your iPhone.

#29
July 13, 2022
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The modifiers vs. the keepers

Throughout the history of keyboards, a battle has been fought by two opposing camps.

On one side, there were keyboards with the modifier keys – the Shifts, the Controls, the Commands. They appeared in QWERTY’s suburbia the moment typewriters needed uppercase and lowercase characters, and never went away. 

Typical layouts of 1880s and 1890s typewriters
Typical layouts of 1880s and 1890s typewriters

Early typewriters experimented with two, or even three separate shifts, and while eventually we standardized on just one Shift key (cloned onto both sides of the spacebar for convenience), other modifier keys followed in due time – Margin Release in typewriters, Ctrl in teletypes, Code in word processors, Alt in terminals. Each one added at least one new possible function to other keys, and likely more after you started combining the modifier keys (like in the infamous Ctrl+Alt+Del).

#28
June 20, 2022
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“Something magical happened to me today.”

What’s going on with the book

There’s no easy way to put this.

The book is ready to go. The writing, proofreading, typesetting are completely done, and photography’s incredibly close. The campaign video is 100% ready. The cool little site I made for the occasion needs just a few extra days of polish.

But the book also needs to be delayed. All of this – regrettably, sadly, frustratingly – is owing to the supply chain problems. The printers are either unavailable or overloaded, the right paper is hard to come by, and the situation seems to be changing by a month. My friend, who’s been in this business for over a decade, told me “I’ve never seen it being so bad. If you don’t have to rush, I’d advise waiting.”

#27
April 20, 2022
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Moiré no more

I learned a thing long time ago, and it was: Once you print something, you can’t get it back.

On the surface, this statement doesn’t make any sense. Scanners are cheap, and in 2021 some digital cameras are as good as scanners, too. Optical character recognition is so fast that it can happen in real time, leaving enough processor power for simultaneous translation to a different language. And I myself bragged about scanning almost 400 printed items and putting them up on the Internet Archive the other day.

But something happens to photos in particular when they get printed. Pixels only make sense on displays. To survive in real life, pixels have to get translated into halftones – complex patterns of translucent cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dots that overlap, vary in size, and are rotated at strange, yet deliberate angles.

#26
September 1, 2021
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The worst keyboard ever made

I’m writing this newsletter under duress. The last issue, one I sent just a week ago, arrived in spam folders for most people owing to a glitch in Revue – and I really wanted you to know about the livestream that’s happening this Saturday.

But this also presents a fun opportunity. The many recent issues of the newsletter were complex mini essays, and it might be fun to do something much simpler. So let’s just talk about three bad keyboards I’ve gotten recently!

Keyboard №1

I watched the TV show Chernobyl with a pit in my stomach, but also – please, do not judge me – a strange sense of nostalgia.

#25
July 12, 2021
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How I learned to hate InDesign

Quick updates first: 

  • I am aiming to release the book in 2022. There are still many unknowns, but people who know the printing process better than I am tell me this is doable. (I still have to go to to a museum in Spain, but hoping this becomes possible.)
  • Let’s meet! I will be hosting a very informal livestream if you want to come: see some of my keyboards, and let’s just chat! This will be happening on Saturday, July 17, at 10am San Francisco time (5pm GMT). More livestream details and sign-up info here

⌘

A few weeks ago, my coworker tweeted this:

#24
July 6, 2021
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In the land of the lounge lizards

I open the door, exit the bar, and walk outside onto the sidewalk in a surprisingly straight line. It’s a nice, warm night. I hear muffled music coming from the inside, and the buzzing of the blinking neon that’s trying very hard to spell “Lefty’s.” I take a deep whiff and immediately regret it, being reminded of a large trash bin nearby.

And then, it hits me: I’m a loser. I’m balding, fat, and on the more cruel side of forty. I came to this town searching for love, but I haven’t yet found anything but toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I exchanged all my possessions for the ill-fitting white polyester suit, and I am wasting my days away drinking cheap whiskey at a run-down bar.

I sigh. I hail a taxi cab to get to the casino. Then, I forget how to say “thank you.”

⌘

#23
March 3, 2021
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The last interview

Every Saturday at 8am, a certain ritual takes place. All my snoozed book-related emails resurface that time, my inbox lighting up with dozens of reminders. I respond to a few that need responding, poke a few people I haven’t heard from in months, archive emails that feel complete, and snooze the rest once more so that they reappear in a week.

I learned to love this part of the process, that flywheel of sorts that gives the book some momentum. Some of the emails are eBay purchases in transit, some requests for imagery, some reminders to myself (always, for some reason, in all caps), and some messages to experts and proofreaders. But the group that has always been the trickiest and that lingered the longest is emails to people I wanted to talk to.

There is the art of interviewing, and there is the art of knowing whom to interview. Although I have learned a lot since the first chat I had with Rick Dickinson in 2017, I am still too nervous, too inexperienced, too deferential. I admire other interviewers who can listen to an answer while thinking ahead to the next question, who can fluently steer a conversation, who can coax people to admit to new things or connect old things in new ways, and who can assemble a “B roll” of good quotes while taking care of the main threads. 

#22
August 26, 2020
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A tale of three skeuomorphs

The 1983 Apple Lisa wastebasket – the first trashcan in GUI history
The 1983 Apple Lisa wastebasket – the first trashcan in GUI history

You’ve always been a bit suspicious of the trashcan on your computer’s imaginary desk top, and I’m here to tell you why. 

I know what you’re thinking – I figured it out already, in real life no one keeps a trashcan on top of their desk. Yes, this adds to the tension. But the real reason is, I think, far more interesting.

The trashcan is an example of a skeuomorph – an intentional borrowing from a prior time that exists as a bridge to the past in order to make people feel comfortable and familiar.

#21
July 7, 2020
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Dear Cynthia

Sometime in 2019, I fell in love with a photo in a way I’ve never known before:

What grasped me here? Many things. The grittiness. The composition. The angular shapes of the key punch machine juxtaposed with the person typing. The stains on the wall. The sideburns and the glasses placing the action, I thought, some time in the 1970s. And that sign, that sign! “EXPRESS KEYPUNCH: 3 minutes or 6 cards (or until asked to leave!)” Six cards means a mere 480 bytes; you don’t expect a keyboard to be in such high demand.

I’ve loved photos before. But with this one, there was a new factor: I loved it so much that I wanted it in my book.

#20
April 20, 2020
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Greatest hits 2016–2019

It’s hard for me to explain how I feel about Twitter. On one hand, there is the abuse, the Nazis, and Jack Dorsey’s almost legendary indolence. When it doesn’t chip away at your attention, Twitter creates – and then supercharges – your outrage.

But also: Twitter has been helpful and, as cheesy as it sounds, made me a better person. Yes, I sometimes become snarky and (very occasionally) even cruel, but I also try hard to follow activists, pay attention to thoughtful people, and listen to many who simply… don’t look like me.

As for the book, I quoted Twitter many times in this newsletter, and there’s a reason: it is on Twitter that I found a great community of people that engage me, share things with me, cheer me on when I share my process, and up when I struggle. This has been a crucial part of writing, and I’m thankful for it.

So, this newsletter will be rather simple: just links to my best/most popular Twitter threads related to the book. You’ll have to brave Twitter’s oft-confusing user interface – but I swear it’ll be worth it.

It’s not just keyboards. Even some of the touch typing manuals can be great-looking:

A few fun stories

This is a forgotten story of Typit, the typewriter extension to solve a problem we all take for granted today:

Step aside Enigma, the most interesting crypto keyboard is… the Barbie Typewriter:

And, speaking of cryptography – a story of that one time I keylogged myself:

About a few keys

This is a thread about the unexpected origins of the ⌘ key:

Never meet your heroes, or an internet appliance with an unusual button:

And, an ongoing thread of weird keys in general:

Solving mysteries

I ask people to send me the most unusual keyboards they can think of without any context, as a challenge:

Other times, people help me out in identification. This Spectrum joystick should look familiar if you read the last newsletter:

A few months earlier, Twitter friends helped me figure out the make of a rather unusual and rare computer:

Not everything’s super great

Through this Twitter thread, you might learn to hate novelty calculators:

…or wristwatch keyboards:

Or Soviet clones of Spectrum computers (of course, it’s entirely possible you’ll learn to love them instead):

Smaller threads (on smaller things)

“This note in a used book I just bought broke my heart”:

Great miniature art by Tanaka Tatsuya. He’s been doing it for so long that just the keyboard-related entires make for a great thread:

“3–8 minute shorts about old men repairing typewriters.”

Pop culture

Once I asked about movies that feature typing, and people floored me with their answers (fun game: count how often my response is “Ooooh.”):

A grab bag of fun links about auto-suggest/auto-complete/spell check/predictive text:

Around the world

This thread of people sending in translations of the term “touch typing” in different languages was extraordinary:

I went to Japan and I started documenting every keyboard I saw… and then gave up. There were too many:

At a museum in Laws, California, I also found a surprising number of keyboards – and then convinced the staff to let me into secret areas just so I could take some photos for the book: 

A by-appointment-only office tech museum in Delaware had some great artifacts inside:

Another museum in Catalonia revealed so, so many old-school computers with fantastic keyboards (and this thread’s Esc jokes feel timely again!):

And speaking of Catalonia – this here, in late 2016, is my most popular Twitter thread, and a truly miraculous discovery that gave me so much joy and energy (in hindsight so necessary to continue working on this book for so long):

2020

What does the next year bring? I don’t know much, but I have two ideas:

The first is to actually return to that very museum in Figueres, Spain – get to know the owners/collectors, take among the last photos I need for the book, and reunite with that magical place.

The second one? 

The book should come out in late 2020. I think. I hope. I so far avoided promising dates since there have always been so many unknowns on the horizon. But while I am still uncertain of many upcoming tasks, my understanding of the rest of the process is that this – a late 2020 publishing date – should be eminently doable. 

So please keep your fingers crossed, send your best wishes, and… I guess, follow me on Twitter. It’s usually fun, and I’d love your comments and feedback, although sometimes my tweets misfire – as is the case with this recent depressing Christmas thread.

But I won’t leave on that note. Following the last year’s tradition, I have a message for you, written on a one-of-a-kind keyboard. I very much encourage you to view the movie in higher quality, with sound on, but either way:

That 16-segment-display exclamation point is just the best
That 16-segment-display exclamation point is just the best

Marcin

This was newsletter №19 for Shift happens, an upcoming book about keyboards. Read previous issues · Check out all the secret documents

#19
December 22, 2019
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As close as possible to real surfing

It makes perfect sense that the awkward term WYSIWYG – “what you see is what you get” – came into prominence only during the era of computers. For typewriters, what you saw was never not, with the paper output being both the first and the last step in the process, and the typebars matching the keys one to one. Even the non-printing keys (Tab, Return, Margin Release…) only had to be learned once, and afterwards never changed their purpose.

Computers complicated things. Suddenly, keyboards meant polyamorous function keys, shortcuts, macros, accelerators, secret semigraphics, modifiers like Ctrl and Meta and ⌥ – and three, four, or five legends per key.

What’s more, without mechanical linkages any key could conceivably become any other key at the moment’s notice. It happened more often than anyone realized: with any application switch. WordStar’s F3 was different than VisiCalc’s, and that created an interesting challenge: many people worked exclusively in one app, getting used to its particular (and often peculiar) keyboard language – but each person’s main app was a different one. And most keyboards had to be made for everybody.

What to do? Help screens and instruction manuals were slow, and far away. Custom key caps? Expensive. Relegendable keys – those with two plastic pieces and a paper insert – cumbersome. Either way, with at most 19mm² of room, there was only so much you could fit on one key.

#18
December 5, 2019
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To save a keyboard, pt. 3

I don’t know how this works in other museums, but at the Computer History Museum in California, a decade ago, the front-of-house volunteer ladder had three steps.

The first one was being a greeter – saying hello to visitors, explaining the museum’s layout and activities, and handling purchases. After getting some experience doing that, you could graduate to a docent, and sign up to give one of the few pre-arranged public tours.

CHM volunteers at work: greeters (upper row) and docents (lower row)
CHM volunteers at work: greeters (upper row) and docents (lower row)

It was leading those tours that inspired me to tell tech stories in a non-tech way. I became eager to be moved up to a senior docent for its sole perk: a senior docent could put together their own tour. Some months later, I did get my promotion; soon, once in a while, visitors could sign up for my own tour about the history of Macintosh and graphical user interfaces.

#17
September 24, 2019
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When keyboards were desks

I felt a little bad for the few weeks of delay in sending the previous newsletter, so here’s an extra edition. Just like with the jokes issue, there’s no story here – just a stroll through two folders in my database: “Built into desks” and “Tech posed in nature.” I hope you enjoy.

If you’re reading this in Gmail, it will cut it off in the middle. You might consider opening it right now as a page for uninterrupted reading.

⌘

Computers were once so big that in order for keyboards to feel natural, they had to be embedded within desks:

#16
July 23, 2019
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To save a keyboard, pt. 2

What am I typing this on

This is that rare story where a Twitter disagreement led to something amazing.

In May last year, someone tweeted a photo of a rare, specialized, 50-key keyboard:

#15
July 23, 2019
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To save a keyboard, pt. 1

What am I typing this on

I’m writing this on a TA Adler-Royal Satellite 40. It’s among the last typewriters ever made, the final breath of a dying species, arriving just before personal computers with Word took over. 

Even the Triumph-Adler-Royal name is a sad story of companies needing to merge in order to survive
Even the Triumph-Adler-Royal name is a sad story of companies needing to merge in order to survive

In time, 1980s electronic typewriters like the Satellite became derisively known as “wedges.” Wedges cheated you out of all that was good: precisely machined metal was replaced by cheap plastics, rich bell sounds by electronic squeaks, the beloved typebars by an unpleasant cacophony of the daisy wheel. They’re really just shitty personal computers dressed up to resemble typewriters, loved by pretty much no one.

#14
April 27, 2019
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The Italian senate survival manual

“The major, fundamental drawback of the keyboard still consists in its irregular and illogical layout,” wrote one critic a few decades ago. If we could start from scratch, he continued, “it would doubtless be possible to design a more convenient keyboard than the one we now possess.” But, alas, “the art is too old for such an alteration. It is hardly likely that we shall accept a new system, however convenient it may be for the fingers.”

It’s not too difficult to find someone dissatisfied with the keyboard layout. More recently, a blogger summarized it well: “The traditional keyboard is exactly the sort of mess that you end up with when you extend an interface far past what is was originally meant to do.”

People have tried to redesign the keyboard for as long as keyboards existed. Dozens of ideas were thrown around as drawings and patents. Some inventors followed up by creating prototypes of those, and – perhaps naturally – got really good at using them.

And it’s such wonder to watch someone who mastered an unusual keyboard.

#13
February 26, 2019
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The worst keyboard ever made

During my research I encountered many keyboards that felt awful, looked bad, or were conceptually bankrupt. But it was only a few months ago that I found the vilest of keyboards, a truly cursed idea that I almost don’t want to talk about – since that will make it impossible to pretend it never existed.

This keyboard immediately promotes Atari 400, ZX81, IBM PCjr – even the remote for your space heater – from keyboards we’ve thought of as bad to “aaah, maybe we were pretty lucky after all.”

This is an early 1970s calculator called Royal Digital IV. It’s a basic pocket four-function device whose designers went to extremes in the name of cost cutting.

#12
December 20, 2018
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To walk among keyboard magicians

I recently gave a talk at a Berlin conference Beyond Tellerrand about keyboards used for fun and for art. I tried to breeze past the obvious stops (ASCII art, emoji, etc.), and focus on the lesser-known in-betweeners: typewriter mysteries, overtyping, PLATO emoticons, ELIZA, and keyboards in Japan. 

I had fun working on this. You can watch it here:

The whole conference was pirate-themed, so I got this cool logo with a skull and a QWERRRRRRTY keyboard
The whole conference was pirate-themed, so I got this cool logo with a skull and a QWERRRRRRTY keyboard

It was also a talk filled with experiments. The unplanned one was being jet-lagged and sick with cold. I also created a talk companion app (you can read about it and see all the follow-up links), and added a “choose your own adventure” mechanism for myself (with its own keyboard shortcuts!). And, the organizer and I arranged for a little keyboarding fun booth:

#11
December 5, 2018
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A time machine behind the cypress trees

I’ve had, so far, a lot of luck with keyboard-related adventures. Two years ago I stumbled upon a magical typewriter museum in Spain, just a week later I visited what felt like its equally astonishing computer counterpart, and my recent trip to Japan also became a keyboard safari.

The lucky streak continues. Earlier this year, I was looking at my friend’s map, and noticed a few yellow stars fifty miles north of San Francisco. One was some sort of an interesting cypress tree tunnel. Another one, right next door? An old radio station. The combination seemed irresistible, and I immediately started scheming a road trip.

That trip happened a few days ago. After a beautiful drive through winding roads of Point Reyes National Seashore, we arrived at the tree tunnel. It was gorgeous and apparently well-known locally, as evidenced by a steady trickle of visitors and – I’m assuming – an unending voyage of their megapixels to the Instagram servers.

The tunnel in a rare, people-less condition; photo by Frank Schulenburg (remaining photos by me)
The tunnel in a rare, people-less condition; photo by Frank Schulenburg (remaining photos by me)
#10
October 9, 2018
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Stop me if you’ve seen this one before

That the tech industry is not particularly funny becomes cruelly obvious every April Fools’ Day, when perusing books like these — or, in my world, the day when I realized that a) the “keyboard humour” folder in my database has 250 items, and b) precisely none of it will make it into the book.

But then, there’s nothing preventing us from rifling through it together here, in this newsletter.

❧

Let’s get the really bad out of the way first: the predictable Keyboard For X jokes (keyboard for blondes, a once actual sad product, keyboard for Americans, doctor’s keyboard), and replacing some keys with “funny” equivalents (Make Coffee, Fuck It, Oh Shit — a tactic particularly popular with stock photos sites).

#9
September 5, 2018
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Four hands on one keyboard

It was four of us, four teenage boys sitting down to a computer to spend hours playing a videogame known to no one else.

It was four of us because the little corner of a room in a small panelák apartment, partitioned away to be “Marcin’s area,” could hardly fit more people. It was four of us because dividing the 14-inch computer screen into even more pieces would make them unreadable. But primarily, it was four of us because it was hard to fit more than four hands on one keyboard.

My corner of the room, replete with Pet Shop Boys posters, cassette tapes, a dot-matrix printer, and a creepy lamp
My corner of the room, replete with Pet Shop Boys posters, cassette tapes, a dot-matrix printer, and a creepy lamp

We played a game I myself wrote. It was inspired by “light cycles,” a sci-fi sport made sci-fi popular by 1982’s movie Tron. My rendition had a very unimaginative name: Lines. It was the version number – 4.2 – that suggested all the creativity went elsewhere.

#8
July 2, 2018
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Shift + Shift

This happened about two years ago. It was close to the end of a workday. I was a little stressed out, more than a little tired, a coworker was standing next to me asking for a certain file, and so I went to my computer’s terminal, keyed in three simple characters: c:\…

…and then I froze.

c:\ is a perfectly fine incantation for when you want to find a file, and you intend to start at the very top. It will work on every PC ever made. Other computers have equivalent sequences that achieve the same purpose; on a Mac, for example, you would type in cd ~ instead. The thing is, I was using a Mac that day. What was even more interesting: I’ve been using Macs – exclusively – for the past twelve years. 

Somewhere in the depths of my muscle memory, c:\ was still there from my long-gone PC days, dormant for over a decade, apparently just waiting to be awakened under certain conditions – such as being tired, stressed out, and absent-minded. 

#7
May 17, 2018
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A love letter to the in-betweeners

What am I typing this issue on?

Here’s one thing that’s been bringing me a surprising amount of joy when writing the book. No, it wasn’t figuring out final answers to puzzling questions (there really aren’t many), or finding Some Thing’s definitive first appearance (history, it turns out, generally dislikes the word “first” as much as it does “best”). It was encountering all the seemingly confused concepts, machines that didn’t quite belong, ideas before or after their time. The in-betweeners.

For a hot 19th-century second, the first popular typewriter looked like a sewing machine, complete with a foot pedal for “return.” Early 1960s computer keyboards had an extra component inside to… hit the case and make typewriter-like noise when typing. Along the same lines, there was an early computer with typewriter knobs. And a joystick to be mounted on top of arrow keys. And a typewriter with AM radio built in:

#6
May 8, 2018
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Bigger in Japan

My post-first-draft celebration trip took me to Japan. It was a journey of unprecedented intensity, from the urban density of Tokyo to an emotional gut punch of Hiroshima. There wasn’t an hour – and often minute – when I didn’t notice some unusual design detail.

This was vacation, and I didn’t expect how much of the trip would end up revolving around keyboards anyway. Turns out, Japan still has electronics stores – whole neighbourhoods of electronics stores – as if Amazon never happened. To a little boy who grew up without anything resembling even a RadioShack, visiting them was fulfilling a dream I long but gave up on.

In those stores, there were aisles and aisles of keyboards: cheap smartphone add-ons, stylized keyboards for gamers, and expensive mechanical keyboards for aficionados.

#5
March 10, 2018
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320K ought to be enough for anybody

What’s going on with the book?

In 1867, a Milwaukee inventor Christopher Latham Sholes showed a prototype of the first true typewriter to an outside investor, James Densmore. Sholes labored over the machine for almost a year at this point, taking it from a crude one-key prototype to a full typewriter.

The investor looked at and said “It’s a great proof of concept.” It stung, this backhanded compliment, this casual dismissal of all the effort made so far. But Densmore was right, and they both got to work. They solved many technical problems. They came up with the QWERTY layout and invented the spacebar. They filed for various patents. They enlisted other people. They built dozens of prototypes, and saw half of them destroyed in use by eager beta testers. They attempted real production a few times – failing, failing, and failing again.

It took them six years to improve the typewriter to the point they were happy with it. Only then they landed a coveted meeting with one rare company that could mass-produce their artifact while keeping the precision necessary for it to function – the arms maker Remington. And so they took the typewriter from the shop in Milwaukee to Ilion, NY. They walked into Remington offices, and they showed off the machine they spent their years and their fortune on, describing all the challenges it took them so long to enumerate and conquer.

#4
January 17, 2018
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Adult-onset felinophilia

What’s going on with the book?

250K words written as of yesterday, 80% done. It’s now a home stretch towards wrapping up the first draft. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Other keyboard books that make great gifts

#3
November 21, 2017
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The shattered dreams of Ryan Seacrest

What’s going on with the book?

Just wrote the thirtieth chapter and crossed 200K words. Still on track to finish the first draft this year.

A secret document I’m sharing just with you

From The Power Broker to What If?, here’s a list of books that are inspiring my book. (Also, a nice reading list.) If you can think of another volume my book reminds you of – please, let me know!

#2
October 9, 2017
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The worst keyboard ever made

This is not only the first newsletter for Shift Happens, but my first newsletter ever. I came up with the format below; let me know what you think!

What’s going on with the book?

I’m writing, slowly nearing the end. The current goal is to have a finished first draft by year’s close. I think I have some 150K words right now, which is way too much already; the next thing on the docket is finding a good editor to help me shape the book.

A secret document I’m sharing just with you

#1
August 29, 2017
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