Can't Quit the QWERTY Keyboard

either directly or indirectly into those computational machines. The older technology I'm talking about is, of course, the typewriter, and we gradually saw the evolution of the computer keyboard. And we're about eighty years out from those days where keyboards were starting to become a thing for computers. They didn't always look the way they do today. Some of the keyboards for early computers were just you know, numeral pads

and not a full keyboard. But my point is we're eighty years out and the keyboard is still around, whether it's an actual physical keyboard or an on screen one, or even one of those fancy laser ones where it projects it on a on a flat surface and you just move your fingers to the the area on the surface that is designated a key anyway, we've we've stuck with that form factor for decades, nearly a century in fact,

if you're talking about typewriters, more than a century. So today I wanted to talk a bit about the history of the keyboard, as well as some alternatives that people have proposed to the old TYPEE TYPEE it's like to call it, and perhaps explore why nothing has really taken its place so far. Now, before I jump in, I do want to acknowledge that there are other user interfaces

out there that have become popular. Touch screens have removed some of the need for keyboards, at least for certain applications. Voice commands are popular in some contexts, but not all. You might use voice commands for a hands free experience with your phone or to interact with a smart speaker, But for most of us, I would wager that we

don't use voice interaction with our computers. But I also want to acknowledge that while that may be true for most of us, it's certainly not true for all of us. Voice interaction is an important component and provides accessibility options for people who might not otherwise be able to interact with computers using a traditional keyboard, at least not do

so easily. So please understand I'm not dismissing alternatives out of hand, but rather exploring why the keyboard form factor these days, also coupled with the computer mouse, has remained constant over multiple generations of computers. So, as I said, the predecessor to the keyboard was the good old typewriter, and the predecessor of that device was the Tarot type,

a sort of proto typewriter. That's p T E R O T Y p E. Actually you could just call the Pterot type a typewriter, though the mechanisms and keyboard layout would be different from later devices. A man named John Jonathan Pratt born in eighteen thirty one, invented it. John Pratt was born in South Carolina, and he lived in the South, making him a citizen of the Confederacy

during the Civil War. He was also a slave owner until eighteen sixty one, whereupon he sold them in order to travel to the UK, where he would show off his device in an effort to get patents could be He had figured, you know, pretty much on the money that being a citizen of the Confederacy would mean he would see very little support from the U. S. Patent Office, so he thought he would bypass that and go to England instead, so the Tarotype would become the first typewriter

device sold to the public, but many scholars referred to him as the grandfather of the typewriter, not the father of it. The keys of the pterotype were laid out very differently than the ones you would find on a modern computer or typewriter keyboard. On the left side, you had a top row of numerals, but it was just two through six, and then you had three rows of letters in alphabetic order A through M. Then you had on the right side, so split from the left side,

you had a similar arrangement. You had the top row with numerals seven, eight, and nine, plus a comma and a period. Then you had three rows of letters in through y. You were supposed to use I and oh to represent one in zero. That's why there were no one or zero buttons there. And there was a really big button for spaces to put space between letters. So when you finished one word and we're about to start another, so this is p key time era, that's a pre quirty.

If you were to come across. The first commercial typewriter device today, like the first one that was really being sold, the terotype was intended to be, but they're very few that were produced. You would probably think you had encountered some sort of steampunk esque sci fi gadget. A Danish inventor named Rasmus Molling Hansen built a device generally called the writing Ball. He mounted the keys on a semi sphere that, in turn was mounted above the carriage that

held the paper. And it makes me think it's a cross between R two D two and Pinhead from the movie Hell Raiser, if Pinhead had typing keys instead of pins stuck out of his noggin. While the writing Ball was the first commercial typewriter device, it wasn't a widespread success, though Hansen apparently sold quite a few in England. These devices today go for a pretty penny or actually a lot of pretty pennies at auction, fetching more than a

hundred thousand dollars in some cases princely some. But as much as I would love a globe shaped keyboard for my computer, it's not the form factor that stuck around. An American feller by the name of Christopher Latham Shoals gets the credit for being the father of the proper modern typewriter. Shoals was born in eighteen nineteen in Pennsylvania. He apprenticed to a printer to learn a trade, and in eighteen thirty seven he and his older brothers moved

out to Green Bay, Wisconsin. The brothers published a newspaper out in Green Bay. Christopher landed a job as the editor of the Wisconsin Inquirer in Madison, and after being editor of a couple of other newspapers, he decided to try his hand at politics and was elected to the state legislature. By the eighteen sixties, Shoals was inventing devices to make life easier for those who work with paper and inc In eighteen sixty four, he and his friend Samuel W. So Leigh received a patent for a machine

that would number pages. After inventing that, a colleague suggested that he might make a device similar to Pratt's Tarot type, something that could print not just numbers, but letters onto paper. Pratt had already worked on mechanical systems that would advance the position of a piece of paper so that you could type a series of symbols on the paper without

them all being piled on top of each other. In other words, he created these these mechanical devices that would advance the papers position and that way, if you were to type T, the paper would advance by one spot. You could type TEA again and it would be, you know, one spot to the right of the first one. So Shoal set out to create an evolved version of this technology. He took a slightly different approach when it came to

the actual layout of keys. So first of all, he didn't have a split keyboard the way the parotype did. He grouped them all into four rows of keys, plus a space bar at the bottom of the rows. So the top row had the numerals two through nine, plus a dash. Like the pterotype, you were supposed to use I and O to stand in for one and zero. The second row had the vowels A, E, and I. Then you had a period, then you had a question mark,

then you had why you oh, and the comma. The third row was B through M in alphabetical order, and the fourth row was Z through in in reverse alphabetical order. So if you were following along on row three, you would just go down at the far right and then move right to left to continue the alphabet, which I admit sounds really strange to us, but if you take a look at the modern keyboard, you realize that these letters are all in one crazy kind of order. Him

A right. When Remington's bought the rights to Shulz typewriter in eighteen seventy three, the company made a couple of changes, getting a little closer to the order that we're familiar

with today with the quirty letters. That's Q W, E R T Y in the second row, the first letters in the second row beneath numbers two through nine, a dash, a common an underscore, and the layout of the letters is pretty similar to what you would see in a modern keyboard today, though the M was in a different place, as it would be found to the right of the L key and next to the N key at the bottom row. Where the M is on modern keyboards was actually a question mark, like where did the M go? Oh,

it's up there. The quirty keyboard became a standard around two, fittingly with the Remington's standard typewriter number two. The story I hear is that the reason for the changes, we're moving the M key down to the last row all that kind of stuff. That wasn't to make the keyboard

more efficient or to avoid issues with typewriters jamming. It was, according to the story, an effort to avoid having to pay royalties too Shoals After all, the keyboard was laid out in different way, so it can't be Shoals design. Now I should add that while I have heard this story, I've never seen any definitive proof that this was actually the reason why the Remington's Standard Number two keyboard was

slightly different from shoals Is design. May have turned out that the folks at Remington's were just continuing to tweak the key layout to get the best arrangement. Anyway, as I said, this is when the M key migrated down to be next to the N key. As for the reason of the layout, well, that's one of those stories that has a lot of mythology behind it. But the commonly told story is that old typewriters, which were purely

mechanical inventions, had issues with type bars jamming. Once type has got pretty fast, it typing the most common letters. Then if those letters were too close together, or if type has got too fast, then the bars would collide with one another and jam up the machine. Because you

have to remember these were purely mechanical systems. The keys were essentially connected to levers that would power a type bar to strike the you know, usually an inked ribbon and then print a letter onto a piece of paper. So with that in mind, if you were typing super fast and a bunch of these type bars were coming up to that center spot at once, they could get

caught in each other and then the machine jams. So that's the story that goes that that the reason the keyboard was laid out was purposefully to slow people down and to make sure that very uh frequently used letters wouldn't be in positions that would cause jams. However, there doesn't seem to be any definitive support for that theory.

Now it may have been coincidentally true, but generally the thinking is that Shoals and the folks at Remington's got feedback from various users, many of them telegraph operators, and the tweaks they made were based on that feedback. And this was before anyone had developed a touch typing method. So maybe it was because of jamming. Maybe it was just that typists were discovering that certain keys were just

not an ideal position for typing. It doesn't stop numerous sites and videos and even this podcast once upon a time from repeating that the real answer was because type is typists were jamming machines, and that's why we have a quarty keyboard and it's completely outdated and we should change it. We just don't know that that's actually true.

It might be, but we can't say for certain. Anyway, we can say that the modern keyboard layout can trace its origins to around eight two, so the keys haven't really changed in nearly a century and a half for quarity keyboards for the English speaking world, which is pretty wild, isn't it. And now we have all sorts of different versions of the keyboard, from the physical keyboard that I typed my notes on for these shows, two on screen keyboards for stuff like smartphone. Now let's skip ahead a

little bit. The typewriter became a popular type of technology, with several companies popping up to compete against each other. You had Remington's, you had Underwood, Oliver, Corona Royal, and many more. If you want to learn more about those, just ask Tom Hanks. I understand he collects old typewriters. Anyway, we're going to jump ahead to the nineteen tens. In nineteen twenties, that's when a man named James Smathers decided

to advance typewriter technology. While it was possible to type up a message in much less time than it took to write things out by hand, presuming that you are a fairly accomplished typist, that is, the experience could be exhausting, particularly if you were typing all day, because you would feel it. Because again, to to create the impression on the paper, to stamp that letter onto a piece of paper, you had to strike the keys with enough force to move the type bar up to hit that inked ribbon

and leave a letter on the paper. So if you've ever used an old like mechanical typewriter, you know what I'm talking about. I used to have an old underwood and typing on that thing was exhausting after a couple of pages. But hey, what if we turned to technology to do some of that work for us? What if striking a key didn't connect to a mechanical system but an electronic one. That was Smather's idea. He was working on one in the early nineteen tens and he got

a patent for his invention By nineteen twelve. Now we're reaching the point where the keys don't connect to a mechanical lever that strikes the page, but are rather electronic switches, and this transition would carry over to computer keyboards. In nineteen thirty six, we got a serious challenge to the quirty keyboard. August Dvorak and his brother in law, William Deely,

received a patent for a new layout of keys. At this point, quirty was widely adopted throughout the industry, though you would occasionally find keyboards that had some slight differences in a few of the keys, but for the majority of the keys, the layout was pretty much established. Dvorak wanted to increase typing efficiency, which would mean reducing what he called hurdling or jumping over a key for common

two letter combinations. In his mind, you know, very common two letter combinations should either be split up between right and left fingers, or they should be right next to each other. But you shouldn't have to hurdle over and jump across a different key in order to get to the second letter of a two letter combination. Something that's

really common in English so uh. In the Dvorak keyboard, he lays out the vowels of A, O, E, U, and I in that order, from left to right on the third row of keys, So the top row remains the numbers and symbols, the second row is P, Y, F, G, C R, L, and then some other symbols and so on, and you can get Divorat keyboards to this day. You can even remap keys in various programs and use a standard quirty keyboard, but use the Divorac layout within the computer.

Now that means you might want to put some stickers and all your keys to relabel them so you can actually learn the Divorac system. Early claims about divor X keyboard said the system was easier to learn and master than the quirty keyboard, and that typists could reach and surpass the speeds that they could hit with Quirty after

just a few days practice. Subsequent investigation found that these early claims may have been at best exaggerated, but there are people who strongly prefer the Divorac layout, and that includes some people who absolutely swear that the original Divorax study the Navy's studies were perfectly cromulent, and that these subsequent studies that seemed to debunk the original one were flawed and possibly fueled by some sort of big Corty

slush fund or something. I'm not really clear on the details. Now. I've never used a Dvorak keyboard, having learned on the puirty and never really tried anything else, so I can't really comment on it. I can say that there are

a lot of anecdotes. I don't know about any actual, like evidence based accounts, but there are a lot of anecdotes that say that the divorate keyboard results in less exhaustion and and fewer repetitive stress injuries and that kind of thing, like it's arguably healthier to type on a divorate keyboard than a quirty keyboard. But I haven't found anything that definitively says that. It's all, like I said, anecdotal. And of course I'm focusing on keyboards for English speaking

countries here. Keyboards for other countries can look quite a bit different, with different numbers of keys and key combinations to make various characters, but at the end of the day, they're all keyboards. When we come back, I'll talk about some of the different styles of keyboards and what makes them tick, or really, in some cases at least click. But first, let's take a quick break. For most, but not all keyboards, there exists underneath the keys a grid

of circuits called the key matrix. This is where keyboard Neo and Morpheus and Trinity fight. Keyboard agent Smith. Hang on, wait now, I'm being told off Mike that I got that wrong. Apparently the key matrix is a grid of circuits, and if you aren't pressing down on any keys, all the circuits are open. I mean there's no signal flowing through them because there's a break in the circuit. Right, there's not a complete circuit, so a current cannot flow

through it. Pressing down on a key activates a switch that closes the circuit and allows a weak signal to pass through. That signal travels to a processor within the keyboard itself, which registers which key or keys were pressed. If you hold the key down, the processor will detect

that as pressing the key repeatedly. At least with most keyboards, this is essentially a mechanical keyboard, but there are several subtypes of mechanical keyboards, and the thing they have in common is that they all activate a switch to complete a circuit. So let's tackle these in turn. You've got your rubber dome keyboards. Underneath the keys, there's a pattern of small rubber domes that are flexible, but they have a hard center made out of carbon typically, and it

looks a little bit like bubble wrap. When you push down on a key, the key pushes down on the dome, causing it to squish, and the carbon center presses down to complete the circuit. So every single letter, every single number, every single symbol has one of these little domes over its individual little switch. When you let go of the key causes the dome to move back to its original dome shape and the key moves back up. The keyboards

are pretty cheap. They also do it fairly decent job at protecting keyboards from spills because there's effectively a rubber sheet covering the circuitry. But I think most folks don't really imagine these when they think of a mechanical keyboard. Some of the dome based keyboards have a mechanism called a scissor switch. This is a pair of plastic pieces on either side of the key that look like scissors, thus the name. They act as sort of a spring.

So the scissor switch style keyboards require less distance to go from the key being up to being depressed as it pushed down, not as in Feeling Blue. They tend to be a little more quiet than other types of keyboards, and they have a lower profile, you know, they don't have to be raised up as high. So these are the types of keyboards you find in laptops pretty frequently. The laptop that I have in front of me, the one I typed my notes on for this show, has

this type of keyboard. There's still a dome under the keys, but the keys don't require much worse to press down, nor do they go as far from a pure dome based mechanical keyboard perspective. Similar to that type of keyboard our membrane keyboards. These have a membrane that on the underside, the side that's facing the circuitry has a pattern printed on it, and pressing on a key pushes the membrane against the circuitry, which completes the circuit at that point

or points. There are membrane keyboards that are totally flexible, the kind that often come with stuff like tablet computers, you know, like the rollable keyboards and stuff. They don't have the clicky tactile response you get with other mechanical keyboards. That's one of the reasons I don't really like this kind of keyboard because it's hard to tell from touch if the computer has registered the key press, and if you're not looking at, you know, the screen where the

text is appearing, that can be a problem. Like I can sometimes be typing notes while looking at a source so I'm not looking directly at my document. I'm looking at the source material and I'm making sure I'm getting like dates, write and stuff. But that means that if I'm typing by touch and I can't tell if the key strike I just did was registered or not, i might look at my notes and see that I've got a ton of typos there because some of my key

strokes just didn't get registered. That's something that's irritating to me. That's why I don't like membrane keyboards. However, they are super cheap, so they are incredibly affordable. The other two major types of mechanical keyboards are similar and that they both have spring loaded keys, so a spring holds them in position. That you have metal contact keys, which as the name suggests, have a metal contact on the underside of the key itself, so pressing the key compresses the spring.

It brings the metal contact into you know, contact with the circuit, thus completing it at that point and letting go of the key lets the spring expand back to its normal size. Uh. Those tend to be really clicky kind of keys. It's what I think most people associate

with mechanical keyboards, that clicky, clacky kind of thing. Then you've got foam element keys, which are really pretty much the same as the middle contacts, but of course instead of having a metal contact under the key, there's a piece of spongey foam that pushes down on the medal strip that then makes contact with the circuit. Like I said, these keyboards have the real mechanical clickiness to them, and

a lot of gamers like these types of keyboards. They feel that that tactle response gives them the confidence they need when they're making a lot of quick moves and games. You know, their eyes are on the screen, so they need to feel confident that when they've pressed a key that it means something. So that click is kind of a confirmation that, yeah, you did hit that button to open the door or pick up an inventory item or

whatever it might be. Now, there is one other type of keyboard I need to mention that is different from these others that I've talked about, and those are capacitive keyboards. So and the or keyboards, pushing a key completes a circuit, but with capacitive keyboards there's already a complete circuit. So pushing down on a key brings a tiny conductive plate into close contact with another tiny conductive plate that's actually

attached to the circuit itself. So when these two plates get really close to each other, it changes the amount of current that's flowing through that part of the circuit just slightly, and the keyboards processor detects that change in current and registers that as a keystroke. I just think that it's neat in the way that most keyboards detective

touch is kind of but not really the opposite. Now, the processor's job is to detect keypresses and then to relay which key presses were made and in what order to the computer. The detection requires the processor to do a little clean up work first, because pressing a key creates an oscillating effect, meaning that while you might press one key one time, there will be tiny oscillations that will make it seem like that key had been pressed many, many,

many times per second. The processor can detect the changes in current and then it kind of weeds out these oscillations and determines the actual keystroke. This is sometimes called de bouncing, as the processors essentially filtering out those oscillations or bounces. The processor actually has a small memory buffer to store data before sending it on, and then on the computer side, you've got the keyboard controller, which receives

and processes data sent from the keyboard. This information then goes on to the operating system. The computer can have another filter that maps keystrokes to specific outcomes, including for those times when you might be using, say an English keyboard to type in a non English language that has characters that English just doesn't have, or if you were to say, use a quirty keyboard but use a divorac

layout within a computer program. Computer keyboards and video displays have been a thing since nineteen sixties, and a thing in consumer computers since the late nineteen seventies. Something that hit the consumer market a little bit later was the computer mouse, but these days, it's pretty much a standard

component of computer setups, at least desktop ones. There are alternatives, obviously, like track pads and then the little racers style controllers that laptops have, but we're going to focus on the standard traditional computer mouse. The computer mouse is actually an invention that emerged from two different efforts, independent efforts. Now the one that most computer geeks know about is Doug Ingelbart, who was an engineer who worked at the Stanford Research Institute.

These days we call that s r I International, and at Stanford, Ingelbart came up with this idea for a device that could act as a pointer for computer so stems, allowing the user to indicate a specific point on a computer screen where they wished to do something such as move a cursor so that they could input text at that point. There were other devices that did that sort of thing, like track balls and light pins, but ingle Bart wanted something that was precise and after maybe a

little bit of practice, very easy to use. So his solution was a computer mouse. But it was a little different from most early computer mouse gadgets we had back in the eighties. Ingle Bart's design had two wheels on the bottom, one was aligned for the x axis of movement and one was aligned for the y axis. So if you're looking from above at a computer mouse pad, you would say one of them was for left right movement, one was for up down movement. So essentially you had

two wheels mounted at ninety degrees from one another. Users would see their movements with this device represented on screen. So if you were making motions with your hand on one plane that was approximately ninety degrees off from the plane of a computer monitor, uh, you could do that. Now, this is something that folks pick up pretty darn fast. I'm sure all of you have had experience working with a computer mouse, and before long it becomes totally natural.

That still blows my mind. It shows the amazing plasticity of the human brain that we can see what we need to do on a screen and then make the appropriate movements with a device connected to our hand that's in a totally different plane, a plane that's off by ninety degrees from what we're looking at. That's just neat to me. I guess I'm easily impressed. Inglebart spoke about this computer mouse idea at a lecture in the early nineteen sixties. Within s r I. He and an engineer

named Bill English worked on making a prototype device. So the first computer mouse from the pair was made out of wood. At least the main body of the mouse was made out of wood, and it had a small red button on the top that acted as your mouse button. And Inglebart didn't call it a mouse at that point. That was a term that would arise later, and the actual origins for it are kind of lost to history.

Inglebart said, I don't know who said it first. People just said it kind of looks like a mouse with a tail, and it kind of got the name that way. But we don't have like a definitive date where we can say this was when the term was coined. But I did say the computer mouse emerged from a couple of different places. The other place was Germany at Telefunken, which was a TV and radio component company, and I'll

have to do a full episode about that company. At some point engineers came up with a similar idea to Inglebart's device. While Inglebart had already spoken about the computer mouse and applied for a patent for it in nineteen sixty seven, his invention was not widely known outside of some fairly small circles. At the same time, the German engineers were creating their own version, and it was much closer to the computer mouse that we had from the

nineteen eighties. So these engineers used a rolling ball rather than a pair of wheels for their mouse. So the computer mouse was in effect a track ball, but upside down. So while you would use your hand to roll a track ball which would otherwise stay stationary, and it would activate sensors that would measure the movement and translate that into cursor movements on the screen, the German mouse did this with you moving the mouse around and the roller

ball would roll across you know, your desk surface. The ball meant you only needed one rolling component because the ball could roll along either the X or the y axis and technically all the stuff in between as well. Inglebart's invention gets the most attention, largely because it played a part in a famous demonstration in nineteen sixty eight, often called the Mother of all demos. This was a presentation to the Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of

Electrical and Electronics Engineer Years. The demo was essentially a laundry list of all the types of stuff we would consider standard in computers. Decades later, Inglebart showed off stuff like hypertext, that is text within a document that links to another document or a section of a document. He showed off collaborative simultaneous editing software, video conferencing. He showed off the computer mouse obviously, and also the g u I or graphical user interface like Windows or the Mac

operating system. Some members of Inglebart's team would in following years migrate over to work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or Park. This group produced a computer that was never sold commercially, but it did feature a window to operating system and a computer mouse as a navigational tool for the machine. A certain Steve Jobs visited Park and saw a demonstration of this device and mysterio see The Apple Macintosh line of computers began to take on

some of those characteristics a few years later. Similarly, Microsoft would get to work on its own g u I that would require the use of a mouse. The Macintosh debuted in nineteen eighty four, and it didn't take very long for the computer mouse to become standard equipment on computers after that. Microsoft Windows first launched in night five, though the first version didn't get much traction, and so

most PC users were still sticking with DOSS. It wasn't until nineteen nineties Windows three point oh that the operating system really started to gain ground. And of course, these days, a lot of computer mousees mices my my anyway, a lot of them are optical. So gone are the roller balls that you would occasionally have to pop out of the mouse and then clean. Those are pretty much gone now. Most of the ones we used today are effectively a very small sled that we push around on the surface

and underneath there's an optical sensor that detects motion. Um. But it's obviously the same general concept, it's just a different way of accomplishing it. Now. When we come back, I'll talk about a few other types of input devices that we currently use for computers, and then chat about why we haven't migrated from the keyboard and mouse, even though it's been around for decades. But first let's take

another quick break. So one of the input devices I've already mentioned is the track ball, which is like the old rollerball mouse gadget turned upside down. We're gonna skip over that one, but you get the point. Then you have other input devices like we had light pens those predate the computer mouse. This was another way to control

cursor placement. The earliest light pens were tethered to computers with cables, and while it was a bit more efficient than trying to maneuver a cursor using keyboard keys, it wasn't exactly convenient. Essentially, a light pin is a kind of specialized optical sensor. It picks up the changes of

brightness for a small group of pixels. This was in the day of cathode ray tube or CRT computer monitors, and the way CRT monitors work is that you have an electron gun that's on the inside of the monitor, so it's behind the screen, and it's effectively painting the screen pixel by pixel, crossing the screen and horizontal lines from top to bottom. So the light pen would pick up the timing of when a specific group of pixels

would change in brightness. And because it's connected directly to the computer, the computer could interpret where the light pen was in relation to the overall screen because the computer knows quote unquote where the electron beam is at any given moment. This created an incredibly precise method for interacting with text on screen. But just as find it inconvenient to use touch screen displays for desktop computers, so do people find light pens a bit tiresome to use. It

can also lead to repetitive stress injuries. The computer mouse would end up being much more comfortable, and so in many but not all applications, the mouse would replace the light pen. Then we have graphic tablets, which see a lot of use today for various purposes, including creating digital art.

Uh those are not terribly different from light pens. It works on a different principle, but like the idea of using a physical pen device or stylus to create a digital representation of something, that is what is not new. Of course, we also have touch screens, which allow us to interface with computer devices through touch. There are a couple of different versions of that. Capacitive touch screens are

usually those are like the most common these days. And then we also had software designed to detect and interpret handwriting, which had a pretty rough start in the early days.

It was a main selling point for the infamous Apple Newton line of devices, but the early versions of the Newton had finnicky handwriting recognition capabilities, which resulted in a lot of errors to me, I think it's funny that the Newton and then later you know, personal digital assistance like the Palm pilots, they were effectively looking for a way to let people use handwriting to take notes on

a digital device. Now, the reason I find it funny is that one of the big reasons folks like Shoals way back in the eighteen hundreds were working on creating typewriters in the first place was to let people quote unquote write faster than they would if they were to

do it by hand. So, in other words, we went from creating the keyboard form factor in order to make it easier and faster to write by uh, you know, using these keys, to creating handwriting recognition software and a stylus interface in order to move away from keyboards him back to writing now. To be fair, the foreign factor for handheld devices means that incorporating keyboards that are easy to use is challenging. If it's a physical keyboard that

impacts the size of the device, including its thickness. If it's an on screen keyboard, you have to be, you know, really good at touch detection and error correction to avoid creating a frustrating user experience, so I get why developers were doing this. It's just funny to me that you had people like Schul saying, we need a better way to write. How about we take the pens out of people's hands and replace it with keys, And then you had a couple of generations later engineers saying we need

a better way to write. We need to take the keys away and put a pen back in people's hands. Just kind of cyclical, I guess. For decades, one of the sci fi visions of the future is a world in which we interact with computers through voice commands, and we definitely have laid the groundwork with this. Voice recognition is a complicated discipline. It's a subset of artificial and eligence, and it took a long time to get it to

a level of precision that's, you know, mostly reliable. So today we've got various smartphones, smart speakers, smart watches, computer systems that can accept voice commands. However, despite all that, some of our more involved tasks with computers tend to be best reserved for a keyboard and mouse. For example, when I type up my notes for episodes, I definitely type them up I could I guess dictate notes to

my computer. But the process of thinking what I need to type and then typing it is a little different from the experience of thinking what I want to say and then speaking it. My composition would change, the nature of my notes would change. Uh, it's just you know, a different approach to creating and then processing and recording thoughts. I guess I could write down my notes and then dictate it, but then I'm just doubling my work. Actually I'm tripling it because then have to record it again

for you guys. So maybe one day I'll give it a shot and just see if I can, you know, extemporaneously speak into a microphone and take notes that way for an episode, you know, researching stuff and then speaking in and just wing it from there. That would be an interesting experiment. I don't know that it would be

a good episode, but it would be an experimental one. Um. But voice recognition voice to text it tends to be a little clunky, which is not helped by the fact that if you want to add punctuation, typically you have to say it period. That's kind of a joke. Then we have just your control systems. Video game consoles have

tried pushing this a lot. You've got gadgets like the Nintendo we which allowed for emotion controls while players were holding various controllers and then making physical motions with them. PlayStation and Xbox have both experimented with cameras and optical sensor basis stems, as well as voice activation for alternative controls, but even in these specific implementations, the technologies have seen limited success. Then you've got eye tracking solutions. These can

be incredibly important from an accessibility standpoint. They can allow people who might not otherwise be able to work a keyboard or use voice activation, be able to you know, interact with a computer system and they direct their eyes to specific points on a screen, which the system tracks. Eye tracking can be used in combination of multiple other

input devices in order to augment the experience. But there's also a privacy concern with this approach, as it means that the computer can track where you're looking, and it can record how long you're looking there. So for a company that you know, makes this money through advertising, like Facebook or Google, that could be incredibly valuable information that starts to feel a little invasive. However, that doesn't mean that eye tracking technology is inherently bad, It just depends

upon the implement mevation of the tech. For certain applications such as VR and a R, it would be useful to have alternatives to keyboards and computer mouse, and many of these use cases the user might not have a clear view of a keyboarder mouse, so something that doesn't depend upon you know, being able to to see and

then touch keyboard or mouse would be really handy. You can use specialized controllers to get around some of this, but again, if you were going to engage in any task that's more involved than the relatively narrow range of commands you would use for say a video game, you would start to hit some challenges. Now that's not to say that various engineers and inventors haven't tried to create alternatives to the classic keyboard. There are several different incarnations

of one handed keyboards out there. Those are meant to allow someone to type with one hand and then they can use their other hand to control a mouse and never have to switch. And from what I understand, the learning experience on these devices is somewhat challenging because you know, you can't typically have a full sized keyboard and expect someone to type on it with one hand. They tend

to be smaller keyboards. That also means that creating every single character means you're gonna be using some combined keystrokes. For certain characters, there's just not you know, not enough keys to go around to represent all of them. That means you're using at least two fingers to create a single letter or number, depending upon the layout and design. There's also a one handed typing solution that gets rid of the keyboard entirely. There's a company called Tap that

created a wearable keyboard and mouse substitute. So, okay, imagine you've got a glove. Let's say it's the right handed glove. Now imagine that you cut the fingers off the glove a little above the base at each finger, so you know you've got a little ring there. Now imagine that you cut away most of the rest of the glove. You only leave a bit of connected fabric betwe in each of the digits, including your thumb. Now you have these loops, these connected loops that you can fit over

your thumb and fingers. Now imagine that you attach some sensors to each of those little rings of fabric, and you kind of have what the tap system is. So what TAP does is register finger taps against any other surface like a desk or a table, or your leg or whatever, and different finger combinations will produce different characters.

So the typical human hand has five fingers, right, and we've got twenty six letters in the English alphabet, Plus we have numerals zero through nine, so ten of those, plus numerous punctuation symbols and other symbols. So to be able to type each of those using a device that registers motion from a maximum of five digits means you've got to rely on a lot of finger combinations to

make that happen. For example, if you wanted to type the letter C, you would have to type your thumb plus your last three fingers, leaving your index finger alone. That would be a C. If you wanted to do an H, it would be your four fingers but not your thumb that you would tap, and A would be just your index fingers. So, as you might imagine, the learning curve on this is a little steep because it

requires a lot of pattern memorization. I'll say the videos of this thing are kind of neat, but I'm not sure that it's a better way to input information than a keyboard, but it could be a useful alternative input device for specific use cases. Now in the future, we're likely to see more brain computer interfaces. In fact, there are lots of companies working on this. Elon musk is gaga over it. We already have examples of these today, but in most cases they require invasive transcranial surgery in

order to implant electrodes into the user's brain. Obviously, anytime you're talking about surgery there are medical risks, and when it comes to the blood brain barrier, the risks are super high. Infection would be deadly. So the test cases involving these interfaces have been restricted to people who are paraplegic but otherwise have few ways to interact with the world around them and tend to be heavily or entirely

dependent upon caretakers. Brain computer interfaces have the potential to return some independence to people who have lives like that, which is incredible and much further down the road, such interfaces might change the way the rest of us interact with our devices. But to get there, we're likely going to need to have technologies that can accurately read brain waves safely without the need for surgery to make it happen. And we'll need applications that can work seamlessly with that

sort of technology. And even then, we might still be using a keyboard and mouse for certain stuff like typing up a novel or whatever, so that we don't have some extraneous thoughts just intrude upon our narration. Something like this could happen. So imagine that I have written a novel. I warned you it will not be a good one, but here we go. So here's my novel, as if I were using a brain computer interface to type it. Jane's hand froze just before touching the door knob. What

if she were wrong? Doubt seeped into her mind, taking hold and make sure you buy milk today because you're out of it. Plus I think the dog needs to go out. Wait did I type that? Am I still typing? Stop? Thinking? Stop and seen? So why do we still have the keyboard and mouse? Well, they've proven to be useful interface devices. I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There are certain tasks that keyboards tend to be the best tool for the job, at least so far. Now that

does not mean it will always be that way. Maybe someone will come up with an input method that's more efficient, more accurate, and easier to use than a keyboard, but it hasn't happened yet, at least not for intense uses like typing out a novel or the notes to a podcast. I'm interested to hear what you think about various interfaces, whether or not we will ever abandon the keyboard and mouse,

or if they're just here to stay. Maybe that's just gonna be a legacy technology that remains useful for as long as we're using computers the way we do. Or maybe you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff. If you would like to get in touch with me, the best way to do that is over on Twitter. Drop me a line. The handle we use for the show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart

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