But when keyboards were first invented they were only used by specialists, not everyone. They were used only by secretaries and typists. Then later they were used on computers but still only by specialists. It wasn't until word processors and computers became widespread that keyboards became something used by almost everyone.
@@Attoparsec He's just pointing out your argument that keyboards being a bad way to enter stuff doesn't hold up on the merit of them having to be used by everyone.
While that is true that not everyone used a keyboard, they were not hard to learn. It was the application that made them specialised not the actual use of them. Even typing one fingered you could use them after a short tutorial, but most people back then had no reason to as they were expensive and perhaps, to an extent unreliable. It is in some way relatable to being able to drive a vehicle, not that hard to learn but in it's infancy not something that had much point, like most technology that is emerging.
@@AureliusR he never alleged that it was a bad way to enter stuff, just that people might be significantly more averse to learning how to use them were it not for the fact that they gradually entered society and slowly were accepted as commonplace. it's not inherently bad, but it is a surprisingly complicated device that the average current-day human is expected to know how to use.
"I figured this board could use a bit of context for future archaeologists" was funny, but actually a great touch. Its actually fascinating to hear about notes being left behind. I had a guitar where the original owner left his hand drawn wiring diagram for his particular pickup setup, just sitting inside the hardware cavity. I would watch a whole channel talking about stuff like that but its probably hella niche.
Typesetting was still thought until the 80s (apparently 90s in East Germany) so there are still people around with that particular muscle memory- would be fun to see an actual typesetter using this keyboard!
I was just thinking this! I learned letterpress in college (art school) and you can get pretty quick at it with some practice, it's muscle memory just like typing.
Manual letterpress printing was one of my (many) hobbies as a kid. - Yeah, I’m both that old *and* that weird 🙁 You’re probably well past this stage, but the mnemonic for the first lower-case row of letters is “Be Careful Driving Elephants Into Small Ford Garages”. The second row is “Let Me Now Help Out Your Punctuation With (commas)” Unfortunately, I no longer remember the phrase for the bottom row at this distant remove :-/ I’m not sure you mentioned it, but the arrangement of the lower-case letters was designed to minimize total hand-travel while composing. I guess that’d also minimize finger mileage in hunt & peck typing as well 😄 *Awesome* project, BTW! Now you just need to make an electromechanical connection between this and the pocket typewriter 😆 (Seriously though, don’t consider doing that, I wouldn’t want to be responsible)
@@littlebirdsword Ah! That’d do it! 👍 I think the one from my high school graphics shop was something different (something about Volvos, maybe?) but villains usually take a ride is great and easy to remember :-) Wow, you still have a letterpress shop? That’s pretty cool! Where are you and what kind of work do you do? Do you have a website? There’s no way I’d have time for it, even if I still had my old Kelsey hand-operated press, but it’s super-nostalgic to remember it. I really loved everything about the process: hand-setting the type and locking it up into the form, inking the press and setting the paper guides, the rhythm of insert-sheet/make the impression/remove the sheet, etc. The smell of kerosene still reminds me of cleaning the press and rollers :-) (Hmm, well - I loved *almost* every part of the process. Not “decomposing” the type. I hated that part 😉)
That's a pretty wild keyboard layout haha. Worst I've used was the layout on an elektronika mk-90 which has a grid of keys and the letters in the order of the russian alphabet, then the latin characters are mapped by the phonetic equivalent to where they map to the russian alphabet, so it's super wacky to type on.
i know basically nothing about electronics but i am a big orthography and word nerd so this was a lot of fun to watch despite the bits that went over my head. I love that you kept some of the ligatures in! So cool to see the frequency of letters/glyphs represented visually on a keyboard
I love when someone has a silly idea and then actually pulls through and builds it! Also, although having been a gamer all my life, and seeing "anti-ghosting" in the marketing of any reputable gaming keyboard, i finally know where ghosting comes from!
This is fascinating; I love a good historically inspired keyboard themed shitpost! Good luck on dvorak as well - I switched right under 3 years ago. It took me about 3 months to get back to 80wpm, which is what I was averaging at the time with qwerty. In my experience it's absolutely worth the switch from qwerty and I even prefer it over modern counterparts like colemak. My friend has an ortholinear keyboard and he's told me that dvorak even more comfortable without the staggered layout.
as someone who *is* a hardcore mechanical keyboard guy (that's how i got this video in my recommended, lol), i absolutely adore this project! such a cool concept even tho it's sort of a joke. i've built a lot of keyboards and this is definitely the prettiest pcb i've ever seen :O
This is the first video I have seen of yours. Your content is right up my ally. Keep it up! I love seeing people with a desire for novelty items figure out how to make them!
Damn cute project! Having worked for a bunch of year for a printing & typography museum, I have a thing for typesetting, both manual and hot metal (mostly Monotype). I love this keyboard and all the work that went into it. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
As an ergonomic custom keyboard enthusiast (qmk dactyl manuform mini) the thumbnail really intrigued me, mostly by how unergonomic it looked 😁 Great project. I really like how the keycap puttying turned out.
Very cool video! My father-in-law ran a mom and pop print shop for most of his career. He had a manual type press and a ton of letter plates. We have one of the plate drawers like what’s shown here. My partner wants to turn it into a photo collage or something. Also, as a nerd who has been typing dvorak for 10+ years, I’d love to see your thoughts after learning it, but give it 30 days; after a week I think I was up to 30ish wpm. It took a couple weeks to reach my usual 80 wpm.
Great vid, really unique and cool that you did most of the stuff yourself. I usually fix old keyboards or build modern kits but you building and designing one from scratch is really impressive. Would definitely enjoy more keyboard content from you mate.
"One of those annoying things that probably would have been faster to automate, but maybe not, so you keep doing it, until you start to question yourself. But then sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and you just keep doing it." This made me laugh, but there were sad tears welling behind my eyes.
What a wonderful piece, I been fascinated by movable type and even have a small collection of letters in different fonts made of wood, I been wanting to do something interesting with them, making a full keyboard is not quite useful as demonstrated, but a small macro pad would be ideal. So thanks for the inspiration!
For the ligatures, wouldn't it make sense to just send the individual characters, eg if you press the "fi" key then send "f" and "i" then it would work in any software, and the software would deal with the ligature in the same way if would deal with it when entered on a regular keyboard.
Bah! What's the point of including ligatures on your keyboard if you're not going to send them to the software _as ligatures._ ff and fi for the win! If they don't display properly, then that's the software's fault for not supporting unicode. (Or the font's just for not having those glyphs.)
Love that you included lines like 'your results may vary' as if anyone watching was seriously contemplating making this weirdo board hahaha. Seriously though- this is such a fun idea, i had never considered keyboards in this way before! Gloriously silly and expertly executed, as the best project videos are.
Also remember that you have decades of muscle memory on the QWERTY keyboard… so to do the test properly you need the same decades of use… or find two that have never typed and give one the QWERTY and the other yours… I guess a old typesetter would probably do fine … if you can resurrect one 😊
Nah, a true "worst" keyboard would probably need a secondary set of keys on the bottom of the keyboard - so you can type your passwords without others seeing them. 😄
The BMI is one of my favorite things to do in town, I go at least once a year. I'm also a member of the B&O Railroad Museum. If you liked the BMI be sure to give that a try someday too!
This reminds me of a video I watched on here of someone using machine learning to optimize which keys are which by using letter frequency and minimizing distance of finger travel.
Thank you for spending the time and money to do something interesting with keyboards. I liked your solution for the ligature keys. The only technically acceptable alternative is to create a Microsoft keyboard layout with custom graphics keys which can include unicode characters... But... The ms keyboard layout generator is based off standard key positions and you would have to translate the whole board to "normal" to figure out what buttons were available.
I'm sure if you chop it into 4 pieces and add some layers, someone will say that it's their perfect keyboard for their freak living situation inside M. C. Escher's "Relativity".
The remains of my father’s letterpress printery holds down the floor of my garage. The US Navy taught me to touch type & copy Morse code. I’ve set type out of 2/3 cases, California Job cases, Franklin cases & Yankee cases & cast type off an Intertype model C keyboard. Looking at your “standard keyboard” technique makes me wonder if you learned to type on a line caster like my father did. . . . That said, it would be interesting to see how I would manage your 2/3 case keyboard. Neat little project.
The type would have been grey metal with black glyphs (from the ink) so I would have used black for the infill. In fact, since you printed the keys, making each one look like a little pile of type would have been very cool (albeit maybe not very comfortable for extended typing…) All-in-all, an interesting project and excellent final result!
although i know nothing about building keyboards, this was pretty fun and interesting. its cool to see someone actual BUILD a funky keyboard instead of watching someone review one you know
The worst keyboard for general purpose use is the custom ones that they use to type addresses from envelopes into post office software when the automated letter recognition software can't cope. It's very, very optimised for its narrow use case so to use it for writing general text is complicated as all heck, especially as what we consider function keys are the default option when you press down on most keys, and creating a standalone glyph needs to be escaped.
I was wondering how you did the infill. What specific epoxy did you use? I've done infill with an injector and nail polish, it works pretty well too, but is stinkier.
That was a super interesting video. In my opinion, if you're going to learn any alt keyboard layout, you're better learning Colemak instead of Dvorak. Colemak keeps zxc where they are on qwerty so you don't lose those precious shortcuts, it's quite a bit easier to learn than dvorak, and it has a more even letter distribution. Plus most words can be written on the home row, which is pretty cool. And as weird as it sounds: CAPSLOCK -> Backspace is amazing, I still do that even when I use Qwerty.
For a dumb idea, that's a lot of polish on the final product. Inside out, very clean. Even though it's not particularly useful, I'm sure this will be an excellent conversation piece to keep on display.
if you ever try something like this again, you should try getting more colors of resin and print the letters out push them in place, might need to make a tolerance for it though, but you could probably get away without it
At 2:00 "miniscule" is actually spelled "minuscule". Interestingly the word "minuscule" and "miniature" have completely different roots, "minuscule" comes from "minus" whlle "miniature" comes from the latin "minium" meaning red, from the small red illustrations in old manuscripts.
