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

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A few weeks ago, my coworker tweeted this:

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.”

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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. 

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.

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.

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 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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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:

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

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.

“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.

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.

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:

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:

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)

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.

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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).

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

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.

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. 

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:

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.