From the highs of the Selectric to the lows of the PCjr.
It’s the work of Marcin Wichary, a Polish designer based in Chicago who’s been blogging about keyboards for years on
When I was at Medium we were really encouraged to just write. And I started doing this partly to use the thing that I’m building, and partly to sort of try it out. At Medium, there were different typewriters in offices, almost as decoration, and there were rooms named after typewriters. I started looking at them and was like, “Oh, these keys are kind of interesting.
In half a year, the Qwerty keyboard will be 150 years old to the day. So the book kind of starts there. There were obviously typewriters before that, but they weren’t mass-produced, they weren’t as important as the first Qwerty typewriter. So basically, I’m trying to go from that moment in time to today. It’s obviously a lot of typewriter history, but it actually spent a little bit more time on the computer side, particularly since the eighties.
So a few things that I know is that it’s not random, right? All the signs point to it being incredibly deliberate. It wasn’t to slow people down, it was to move things around with enough care that you can still type quickly and you could type really quickly on even the first typewriter. They showed the same sort of deliberation even when adapting Qwerty to other languages very early on. You could argue that they did a minimum viable product. They moved just enough so it worked.
Are there any parts of the keyboard that have stuck around that you think have a particularly interesting history? IBM made what they call a “Correcting Selectric.” They put it in a name because it was so important. And basically it was this really interesting application of chemistry where they build a special ribbon so your thing would stick to paper but only slowly permeate it. So if you reacted quickly, you could lift it off the paper before it settled in.
But I was talking to Rick about the process of designing it, not long before he died, and it was surprising to me how much design effort went into this. They just had a lot of constraints. It had to be cheap, it had to be made out of certain things that were available. That’s what speaks to me as a designer: that you cannot decouple design from constraints.
In addition to the written chapters in the book, I gather there’s around 1,300 photographs in there, a mix of original photography and archival shots. Can you talk about the process of putting that together?
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