February 9, 2011

The Keyboard Legacy

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Allow me to continue my keyboard rant from Monday: Not only is the ancient keyboard layout part of our 21st Century life, but a lot of the old typewriter jargon remains as well.

The keyboard layout is, of course, the same on a computer, cell phone, and a typewriter. That layout is irrational, as I discussed in Monday’s blog post, but by using the same layout it makes it easy for any typist to use any gizmo with the same keyboard layout. That makes sense.

The names of the keys are also inherited from the typewriter nomenclature.

Shift. What’s being shifted? Why, back in the typewriter days it was the entire carriage, the thing that held the paper. By shifting the carriage up a notch, the mechanical typewriter arms would print the bottom part of the key-hammer, which was the upper case letter.

Caps Lock. On a typewriter, it was the Shift Lock key. But on a typewriter, pressing Shift Lock meant you used all the shifted keys, including the number keys. Caps Lock on a computer only locks the alphabet keys, not the number or symbol keys.

Tab. The real name of this key is tabulator. The Tab key was used to create tables. Tab. Tabulator. Tables. All those words come from the same Latin root, which was the word for a caramel-flavored diet beverage.

Backspace. On a typewriter, the Backspace key was effectively the same thing as the left arrow key on a computer keyboard. On a computer, the Backspace key backs up and erases. You just can’t do that on a typewriter. That’s why some computer keyboards, such as the Mac’s and certain touchscreen keyboards, call the key Delete or Del.

If you are old enough to have used a mechanical typewriter, the you probably remember that there were two different layouts. I call them the Selectric layout and the Royal layout. With the Royal layout, the double-quote key was found above the 2 key. In the Selectric layout, the double-quote key was next to the Enter/Return key.

Beyond the keys on the keyboard, the names of certain computer actions also date back to the keyboard.

For example, a carriage return is the act of whacking the typewriter’s carriage return bar, which slid the carriage to the right so you could start typing on the left side of the page. Once the carriage was slid over, you’d pushed the carriage return bar one more notch, which produced a line feed to advance the page up a notch in the carriage. Hence: Carriage return, line feed.

Also, the PC computer keyboard calls the carriage return key Enter. That name heralds from the computer’s calculator background. On the Mac, the key is called Return, which is the typewriter term.

These terms won’t be going away any time soon, but at least now you have a tiny clue as to where they came from.

4 Comments

  1. must have been noisy in an office before computers,

    Comment by chiefnoobie — February 9, 2011 @ 2:04 am

  2. Even after computers, chief. Those 1980s impact printers were seriously loud. The daisy wheel printers were like a machine gun. The dot matrix printers literally screamed.

    Comment by admin — February 9, 2011 @ 8:02 am

  3. Dan- Its not just the name of the keys that are old, but the ascii codes that represent the function of carriage return goes back to codes created in the days of the teletype, even before the teletype, quick googleing says its from Baudot code. For example the code for carriage return in Linux is broken up into 2 codes for reasons that are completely related to the mechanical handling of the both the typing head and paper scroll wheel.

    If I could sneak in another question on computer history, could you tell me your impression of the Forth programming language back in the 80s? Im really impressed with it and I think it could have been the perfect interpreter for minicomputers in that day. A forth compiler is still considered to be an operating system in itself by people who do embedded programming.

    Comment by BradC — February 9, 2011 @ 10:02 am

  4. And remember, BradC, that teletype was short for tele-typewriter. 😀

    Forth was part of the great fourth-generation language fad of the late 1980s. It was all about Artificial Intelligence, which was the rage more in Japan than here. I had friends back then who would argue the merits of Forth versus Prolog, another common AI language.

    Never used Forth myself. I did see one of my friends, Bruce Webster, write a Forth program on the early Macintosh. Forth was one of the first compilers that worked directly on the Mac. It took him no time to whip out a silly little program. I was amazed, but at the time I was more focused on learning Assembly and C than venturing off into Forth.

    Comment by admin — February 9, 2011 @ 10:12 am

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