When & Why Did the Shifted Numeral Two Change on Keyboards?

[thorfdbg]

It is certainly different in other parts of the world. I learned typing (with two fingers back then) on an old mechanical keyboard, and as yours, it does have double quotes at shift+2. However, that's a German keyboard, so Z and Y are interchanged. It did have a 1, but it lacked the digit 0, so you had to type it as letter O. For computers, this had to change, so the 0 key was added, though shift+2 stayed the double quote all the time.

 

However, even then keyboards changed a bit. The Amiga had the backslash at a dedicated key that was cut-out from the backspace key. The PC keyboard does not, you have to type some very ugly combination like AltGr+sharp-S to get it, which makes programming on German keyboards particularly unhandly. Same goes for square brackets.

 

Control and caps lock also changed positions. The Amiga (and the old Sun) keyboard had Control in the middle row at the left, which makes typing control sequences easy. Amiga had caps-lock to the right of it, so it was not untypical to simply disable this key - it was in the way. The PC keyboard moved Control to the lower left, making control sequences unhandy.

 

So I usually use a modified keyboard, half German, half American, with caps-lock and control swapped, square angles at Alt+German umlauts, and some other changes (which usually drives my co-workers mad whenever they try to type on my keyboard...)

[tschak909]

The "thumbs up-down" keys, as you call them are voting keys. They are also joined by apathy/indifference keys right next to them. Emacs didn't use them, but lots of one-off programs used them for polling/survey type programs.

 

-Thom

[high voltage]

I use a UK IBM keyboard, but my computer is MS mapped to US. That's the way I got used to it. I just remember what's where.

Reason being, when working for the US Army we used US keyboards, and when I moved to UK I had to have my UK keyboard the US style.

Edited July 21, 2015 by high voltage

[SeaGtGruff]

That picture of the old Royal reminded me of something I've always wondered, too--

 

When did the dollar sign go from two lines through it to only one line through it?

[UNIXcoffee928]

This keyboard, with a nice wood console base would be pretty cool, for emulation, to get the feel of a real Atari 400:

 

Actually, though, I'm staring to think that a secondary multi-touch LCD panel would be the real way to go for a keyboard used specifically for Atari emulation, because, then, you could, say, have an exact photograph of the 400 keyboard displayed, and have all of the keyboard mappings be exactly correct.

[Bryan]

That picture of the old Royal reminded me of something I've always wondered, too--

 

When did the dollar sign go from two lines through it to only one line through it?

It's probably just easier to print that way. Apparently both are common:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign

[Marius]

@topicstarter: you have a pleasant style of writing. I really enjoyed reading your opening post! Thanks for the gorgeous picture of the old typewriter!

[UNIXcoffee928]

@topicstarter: you have a pleasant style of writing. I really enjoyed reading your opening post! Thanks for the gorgeous picture of the old typewriter!

Thanks, and you're welcome! My Mom had always called this typewriter "Old Beauty". It had always served us well, when I was growing up, and it still works flawlessly.

 

It is interesting to note that it uses a ribbon much like the Okidata dot matrix printers still use. It has a separate ruler & guide for Receipt paper, and it is interesting to note that the notion of 80 characters per line was already firmly established (based upon it's main carriage Ruler) when the machine was designed. It is also noteworthy that today's Tab Key is short for "Tabular", as it is expressed, in full, on this keyboard. Presumably, this notion was conceived of specifically for working on Tables, and it is interesting to note that we still navigate the cells of tables with the Tab Key, to this day.

 

Some, today, might not know that typewriters had actual physical bells in them, that ding at the end of a line. This design feature later made it's way to teletypes, then to computers (as a beep), which is why CTRL-G / CHR$(7) is known as "Bell". Other common things like CR (Carriage Return) relate directly back to the typewriter's movable Carriage, along with the idea of LF (Line Feed) which was manually controlled chrome lever on the left or by the knurled Line Feed knobs on both sides of the carriage. This lever was multi-function. After the bell sounds at the end of the line (EOL) manually pulling the lever while also moving the carriage accomplished a CR & LF. There is also a Carriage-Release button, above the chromed screw behind the Carriage Return Lever (which will bring you to EOL with a ding. There is no "Enter" or "Return" Key... the Return was done by hand, so there was no need for a key... literally Returning the Carriage. Other interesting features are multiple settings for how many LFs occur when using the lever (controlled by... you guessed it, another lever, to the right of the chrome screw). Superscript & subscript was approximated with the knob at the end of the carriage, to move a half of a line up or down. This same knob was used to feed paper in to the typewriter, as an approximation of Form Feed (FF), essentially accomplished by many quick Line Feeds (by turning the knob at the end of the carriage).

 

Well, there ya go... "What did you do today?", "I wrote a quick-start manual for an 80+ year old typewriter.".

 

= )

 

 

Edited July 21, 2015 by UNIXcoffee928

[Marius]

Ah I remember it all. When I was a kid my dad had an old olivetti office typewriter. Rather similar to the one in your posts.

 

That machine was so heavy that every character typed felt like an exploding grenade lol.

 

Amazing time. I must honestly admit that I miss that time. Everything seemed so relaxed. No Internet no 24/7 world... I had my 800xl with just a datarecorder and two game carts. The rest of my games was in basic type-in games books and magazines.

 

And guess what: I absolutely adored it. I am a rather sensitive person and I am pretty sure I experience this past now with 'colored glasses' ... but fact is that today's speed is not fitting me very well. So thanks again for your great story about the typewriter

[Andromeda Stardust]

LOL on the 1s and 0s being IOs. Funny that I/O (input/output) is generally data consisting of 1s and 0s...

 

Also dollar sign was easy. S backspace I. In fact many currencies are combinations of symbols. Yen and Euro Y and C with equal signs across them. Euro created issues with computers due to not initially having it's own ASCII symbol.

 

One thing that infuriates me, however, is modern sans serif typeface. I and l. One of those letters is capital I and the other is lowercase l. When I first started college, it was standard to use a serif font such as Times New Roman. Now sans serif (Arial typically) is preferred, and those I's and l's infuriate me.

 

Also ASCII text is a dying art. Most mobile devices cannot even display monospace fonts correctly. Mac and Linux OS do not display text files in monospace anymore, which ruins old art. I used to make the most incredible doodles using plain text emails. Now few people can view them properly...

[+DrVenkman]

Mac and Linux OS do not display text files in monospace anymore, which ruins old art.

OS X doesn't display fixed width fonts by default in Text Edit but you can change that in the Format menu.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[tschak909]

This keyboard, with a nice wood console base would be pretty cool, for emulation, to get the feel of a real Atari 400:

 

Actually, though, I'm staring to think that a secondary multi-touch LCD panel would be the real way to go for a keyboard used specifically for Atari emulation, because, then, you could, say, have an exact photograph of the 400 keyboard displayed, and have all of the keyboard mappings be exactly correct.

 

You mean, like this?

 

 

This is an older shot from 2013 or so, but it is of the smart home platform that I work on, LinuxMCE. As part of the system, the user interface (Orbiter), runs on a variety of devices, including this little x86 touchscreen on my desk, and on the PC providing the media on the TV in the background. It has as part of its system, a game player module, which provides emulation for other systems, including Atari 800, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Apple II, etc...and as part of these computer emulations, I took the time to lay out an accurate keyboard for occasional typing, (within physical and practical limits!)

 

The system can be had from: http://www.linuxmce.org/

 

-Thom

[UNIXcoffee928]

 

You mean, like this?

 

 

This is an older shot from 2013 or so, but it is of the smart home platform that I work on, LinuxMCE. As part of the system, the user interface (Orbiter), runs on a variety of devices, including this little x86 touchscreen on my desk, and on the PC providing the media on the TV in the background. It has as part of its system, a game player module, which provides emulation for other systems, including Atari 800, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Apple II, etc...and as part of these computer emulations, I took the time to lay out an accurate keyboard for occasional typing, (within physical and practical limits!)

 

The system can be had from: http://www.linuxmce.org/

 

-Thom

No, actually. But that is nice.

 

I was thinking more along the lines of putting an Atari 400 keyboard in a scanner, to get an exact, high resolution image of the keyboard. Then I would measure the physical keyboard, and find a multi-touch display with the closest possible aspect ratio to precisely display an actual-sized Atari 400 keyboard (with, ideally, no image boundary areas, nor with any other type of visual information. Only the keyboard is displayed.), then code it up in TCL/TK so that the image has image-mapped, touchable regions that correspond to the physical boundaries of each key.

 

So, for all intents & purposes, it will be the exact size of an Atari 400 keyboard, on the desk, and look exactly identical, on it's screen. I haven't given this idea much serious thought, yet, as to how it will interface with the OS, but there are a number of open-source X-display virtual keyboard projects out there, and I'm sure that one can be modified easily enough & interfaced with the TCL/TK display code.

 

While the 400 keyboard is not necessarily a well-loved thing by most people, the main advantage that it does have is that it's flat, and will transition pretty much perfectly to an LCD (except it won't have the tactile key-surround ridges, but oh, well.). With this in mind, I think that it would be a good, dedicated-device, specifically for Atari emulation.

 

 

This was something that I thought would be fun to do... it's not imagined as a product, or anything... it would just be for personal use. Also, I won't begin on it until I have some money to throw at it, so it is merely just an idea, at this point.

[tschak909]

Dude, I know what you meant. You're just splitting atoms over look and feel at this point. I had to make certain concessions to fit within the human interface guidelines of our system.

 

-Thom

[UNIXcoffee928]

Dude, I know what you meant. You're just splitting atoms over look and feel at this point. I had to make certain concessions to fit within the human interface guidelines of our system.

 

-Thom

Well, the whole point of it was about exact look & feel. Your device uses a standard-looking virtual keyboard with a gradation for the keycaps, and has other information on the display, so it's not the same as what I was describing. Your device looks very nice, though, and has lots of cool extra functionality that's far outside the scope of the simple device that I was proposing.

[UNIXcoffee928]

LOL on the 1s and 0s being IOs. Funny that I/O (input/output) is generally data consisting of 1s and 0s...

Haha, what an excruciatingly fundamental irony! Good eye, on that one!

 

 

...

Also ASCII text is a dying art. Most mobile devices cannot even display monospace fonts correctly. Mac and Linux OS do not display text files in monospace anymore, which ruins old art. I used to make the most incredible doodles using plain text emails. Now few people can view them properly...

This is not a problem under Linux. Must just be the applications that you are using. Just use a terminal-based editor, or gedit, or any of the other gazillion text editors. For emails, you just need to select a monospace font in your email client. Same goes for a mac, in both cases, as well.

 

& yes, I've noticed that about the Ariel Font, also... damned typographers, ha!

[Mr SQL]

Awesome thread UNIXcoffee! I learned to type on a typewriter like yours and transitioned to Teletype and computer keyboards.

 

Picked up a gray market Japan import of a Sony tablet PC in 2002 (model wasn't available in the US) and the keyboard (any keyboard) would switch to a "JP" icon in the system tray with a remapping program and put the " over the 2 and the @ back in the right space amongst other key changes. Apparently the older format is still big in Japan

[fujidude]

I learned to type on IBMSelectric 2 typewriters, then got to use a Selectric 3. Now those were some bad ass typewriters. I think they represent the absolute pinnacle of achievement in typewriters (before they became computerized, ie. word processors).

 

[RevEng]

[...] Some, today, might not know that typewriters had actual physical bells in them, that ding at the end of a line. [...]

 

I was musing to my wife a month or two back that The Typewriter song, despite being a pop culture standard back in its day, is now completely lost to time. Nobody in recent generations would recognize the clack of the keys or the bell.

 

We had a manual typewriter at home, even after electrics were common. I wouldn't go back, but there's something undeniably satisfying about the bell going off at the end of the line and shoving that carriage return bar over with more than a little force.

[UNIXcoffee928]

 

I was musing to my wife a month or two back that The Typewriter song, despite being a pop culture standard back in its day, is now completely lost to time. Nobody in recent generations would recognize the clack of the keys or the bell.

 

We had a manual typewriter at home, even after electrics were common. I wouldn't go back, but there's something undeniably satisfying about the bell going off at the end of the line and shoving that carriage return bar over with more than a little force.

Thanks for telling us about this song, I had never heard of it. I I will be sure to make others listen to it, too... I'm absolutely sure that, at high volume, this song could offend the modern listening sensibilities of more hipsters per square foot (HPSF) than, say, Free Jazz, Slayer's "Reign in Blood", Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown", or any Motorhead, by a long, long ways. Mu-ha-ha... Most definitely on the playlist, for the next time that I have to drive through Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This song will also be right up there with the Collected Works of Carl Stalling, that I'm so fond of playing, at volume, while in heavy traffic... In fact, any time that I perform music, from now on, I will be sure to have the DJ play this song, before we go on. This song is, by far, one of the most classic pieces of audio warfare that I have ever stumbled across. Much like that movie that they advertised by saying, "You must see this movie, it will fu*k you up for Life.", yes, I deliberately listened to "The Typewriter Song" five times in a row. I'm not the same.

 

= )

 

 

In other News, Hackaday recently had an article on the future of the keyboard & typing, which seems apropos to link here.

 

...& for those of you interested in the typewriter, "Old Beauty", featured as the star of this thread, whether for Nostalgia, or to study the technical engineering aspects of her construction, I've determined that she's a Royal Model KHM. Now, "Old Beauty" is not, and never will be for sale, since she's a priceless family heirloom, but some of her sisters can be found on ebay for such a low price that it's a sin.

Like most things on ebay, if you just search for: Royal Typewriter you can also find one visually, and maybe for a good price, like this one (which is ending in a few hours), too.

 

Have fun!

[Marius]

An enthusiastic desire for a revival of the mechanical typewriter is woken up inside of me, thanks to this thread.

 

I'm on a vacation now, but as soon as I'm home I'm going to buy somewhere a good working mechanical typewriter.

 

I'm already a huge fan of fountain pens (I am the proud user of Pelikan M400, several M200 and a fabulous Parker Duofold fp), and I have several exciting inks in use.

But a mechanical typewriter fits perfect in this hobby.

 

I am already using my Atari 8bit for professional use (I do my business administration on SynCalc) and I have future plans of writing a book. I'm doing some try-out txt in The Last Word, which gives both a true vintage, but also a rich featured experience on a8.

 

I also have a Brother AX 20 electronic typewriter in use, but i have the feeling it MUST be non-electronic for me to have this real vintage feel.

 

Thanks for bringing this up!

 

Leaves me with one problem though. I don't want to buy several 2nd hand beasts before I finally find a good one, so I'm leaning towards buying a 2nd hand from an offiical store that delivers this kind of equipment. They claim they clean the typewriter, and do some maintenance so the writer is in near new condition. I know those claims... and in reality it not always what they promise. So I'm scared I pay more money, and finally I end up with the same crap as buying 2nd hand on a marketplace website (cheap).

 

Any experience here on this subject?

[UNIXcoffee928]

An enthusiastic desire for a revival of the mechanical typewriter is woken up inside of me, thanks to this thread.

 

I'm on a vacation now, but as soon as I'm home I'm going to buy somewhere a good working mechanical typewriter.

 

...

Leaves me with one problem though. I don't want to buy several 2nd hand beasts before I finally find a good one, so I'm leaning towards buying a 2nd hand from an offiical store that delivers this kind of equipment. They claim they clean the typewriter, and do some maintenance so the writer is in near new condition. I know those claims... and in reality it not always what they promise. So I'm scared I pay more money, and finally I end up with the same crap as buying 2nd hand on a marketplace website (cheap).

 

Any experience here on this subject?

 

I wouldn't worry about it... It's like buying an older car with a V8... If there's something wrong with it, you & your friends can likely figure it out.

 

For example, that one that's ending soon, with the keys depressed... this happens when a cat walks across a typewriter... ha, really. You just undo the jumble of print elements, by hand, and you're good to go.

 

Everything about the Royal KHM can be cleaned with Windex Original, WD-40, Q-Tips, an old toothbrush, and some cotton rags. A small dab of Armor-All Original, applied by paper towel, is good on the Platen. The whole thing can be disassembled with a screwdriver, but I've never needed to. I suppose that if you wanted to get scratches out of the chrome/plated nickel you could use a buffing wheel on a Dremel, with a light rubbing compound. It is painted with Enamel paint, and most car restoration & detailing techniques are completely fine & dandy for a piece of gear like this.

 

After cleaning with Windex, I give mine a very light coat of WD-40, applied by rag, but there's no reason why you couldn't apply a car wax to the paint, if you chose that route. The car wax would probably be better, because if you do use the WD-40, it can become a cat-fur magnet... but as I had said, a light coat of WD-40 is all you need, so it's not that big of a deal. You apply the Windex directly to the head of the Q-Tip to clean the keycaps, then, go in small circles.

 

You could probably touch up the black with model paint, but a Sharpie pen followed by a quick smudge of the finger will do the trick, for quite some time.

 

That's about it. I wouldn't worry in the least about not getting a working one, because, clearly, after Doomsday, Keith Richards will be typing a story about the extinction of the cockroaches, on his Trusty Royal KHM. Haha!

[ZylonBane]

LOL on the 1s and 0s being IOs. Funny that I/O (input/output) is generally data consisting of 1s and 0s...

 

Read again. 1s on old keyboards were lowercase Ls, not uppercase Is.

[Kyle22]

I don't like the idea of Armor-all on the platen. It is silicone based and could lead to paper slippage and misalignment.

[fujidude]

I forget the name of the product, but there is a rubber terminator on the market. In fact, I think it uses the word rejuvenate in its name.