## Keyboard --- our ancient friend As a Computer Science student or simply a person living in 21st century, we have been friends with keyboard for many years. Today, I wish to introduce to you some history about our loyal friend. In this article, I will briefly cover keyboards origin, and one key innovation of the keyboard. **The begin of journey** Keyboard has been our friends for printing books. Back then, the technology is relatively "rough" and it's not called keyboard. It originates from one of the Chinese ancient inventions --- "movable type". As many people knows, Chinese is a character-based language. Without Pinyin -- a 20th century invention based on 26 English characters, Chinese people need to carve many (I mean, really many) characters on cubes of wood or dried mud, so that the characters can be reused over time. However, as you quickly notice, this is a not effective way for typing, as the cost, or in CS term, overhead, for having such system is too big. Therefore, such technology got "stuck" for almost two thousand years. Until, Francesco Rampazetto invented the first typewriter in 1575 (undocumented) and so did Henry Mill's typewriter-like machine in 1724. **Birth of effectively used machine** During 1800s, there are many pioneers trying to invented a good typewriters and facility for print, e.g. carbon paper; but it was not until William Austin Burt patented a machine called the "Typographer" that we had our first documented type-writer. By the mid-19th century, the increasing pace of business communication had created a need for mechanization of the writing process. e.g. stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates up to 130 words per minute, whereas a writer with a pen was limited to a maximum of 30 words per minute (the 1853 speed record). From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production. In 1865, Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented the Hansen Writing Ball, which went into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. In the old time, there is no computer that can execute people's command; the typed character is directly printed on paper with ink through "type-bar" ![Typebars of a typewriter](https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/typebars-typewriter-450w-1313634191.jpg) Of course, there is no electronic devices used and the mechanical parts are not as micro as the ones we have today, so everything -- "keys", the printing mechanism, etc. -- are done with carefully and cleverly designed physical parts, and a who type-writer/keyboard is fairly big, compared with today's keyboard. Not to mention earlier time, where the mechanism are even less advanced. **One turning point on keyboard design** A significant innovation was the shift key, introduced with the Remington No. 2 in 1878. This key physically "shifted" either the basket of type-bars -- "basket shift", or the paper-holding carriage -- "carriage shift". The mechanism caused a different portion of the type-bar to come in contact with the "platen" -- key. The result is that each type-bar could type two different characters, halfing the number of keys and type-bars (and simplifying the internal mechanisms considerably). As one can quickly notice, the obvious use for this was to allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case, but normally the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special symbols such as percent (%) and ampersand (&). Before the shift key, typewriters had to have a separate key and type-bar for upper-case letters; in essence, the typewriter had two keyboards, one above the other. With the shift key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain models, such as the "Barlet", had a double shift so that each key performed three functions. These little three-row machines were portable and could be used by journalists. However, because the shift key required more force to push (its mechanism was moving a much larger mass than other keys), and was operated by the little finger (normally the weakest finger on the hand), it was difficult to hold the shift down for more than two or three consecutive strokes. The "shift lock" key (the precursor to the modern Caps-Lock) allowed the shift operation to be maintained indefinitely. **Parting words** The entire history of keyboard, in my humble opinion, deserves a book to detail. This article, in a few hundreds words, aims to sparkling your interest in keyboard history and reminding people that there are much to be noticed about keyboard than people usually see on the surface. For example, who can notices that the use of simple shift key and Caps-Locks key used to be a big thing in the early days? Some intriguing sub-topics on keyboard history include but not limited to the keyboard's layout design -- QWERTY, Dvorak, etc. and keyboard mechanics design-- membrane keyboard, mechanical keyboard, Capacitive Keyboard, etc. **Reference :** Picture: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/typebars-typewriter-1313634191 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter