{"id":2656,"date":"2011-02-09T00:01:39","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T08:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=2656"},"modified":"2011-02-08T20:50:51","modified_gmt":"2011-02-09T04:50:51","slug":"the-keyboard-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=2656","title":{"rendered":"The Keyboard Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The names of the keys are also inherited from the typewriter nomenclature.<\/p>\n

Shift.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

And upper case<\/em>? The reason the capital letters are called upper case is that they were stored in the upper part of the case that held all the moveable type letters back in the printing press days.<\/p>\n

Caps Lock.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

Tab.<\/strong> The real name of this key is tabulator<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

Backspace.<\/strong> 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Beyond the keys on the keyboard, the names of certain computer actions also date back to the keyboard.<\/p>\n

For example, a carriage return<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2656"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2663,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656\/revisions\/2663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}