@th What the what?!
@mwichary in case you haven't seen this one yet
@th thanks i hate it
@th I had one of those when I was little, flea market find, it went to bits when I explored how it was put together and worked .. babillions of cogs.
@th There must be a reason for this layout. The arrows are logical, so must be the rest?
@daherb @th @DenOfEarth @artelse I heard from a bloke with a dog on a string that someone got a copy of the New York Times and counted how often each number came up and put the most common ones in the middle.
@th I guess because you type 0 most often?
A number in the decimal System could be: 1432567. In an abstract visualization: xyyyyyy. Every y can be a digit 0-9. And every digit has the same probability. That is different for the first digit x. It is never 0 (apart from Software development and few other special cases). But for the other digits 1-9 the probability is not the same: in ~50% of cases it is a 1, second most is 2 and so on, with 9 least likely. It is a Feature of number Systems. It can also be used for fraud detection: if a document contains falsified numbers the likelyhood of 1 as the first digit is significantly less than 50%.
@wmd @Life_is @th lemme hazard a guess: because (these) calculators were primarily targeted at shopkeepers, who would make use of the 00 every time they needed to type a whole number of their currency (say, $1.00), similarly, the 000 for thousands.
Or in other words: while 1 may be the most common *single digit*, 00 and 000 are the most commonly typed *strings of digits*, especially in currency settings.
@wmd @Life_is @th Let's verify that this could be the case on written words: I'm using the OANC here. First, the most common *letter* of English is 'e', no surprise there. But the most common *digraph*? It's 'th'. 'ee' is nowhere in sight. If I wanted to make a keyboard for English that makes digraphs easier to type, 'th', 'he', 'in' and 'er' would be my choice.
@wmd @Life_is @th We can, of course, try to do the same for numbers. But I don't have a corpus of (plausibly distributed) numbers available. We can use the OANC again, and then the most common numeric digraphs seem to be 19, 20, 10, and only then 00.
However, this is written language and NOT the kind of numbers you would type into a calculator. I'd need to look for some online price database or something like that.
@wmd @Life_is @th On why written language carries with it certain biases, see https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cllt-2022-0082/html?lang=en
tl;dr: culturally salient numbers, such as the numbers of recent years are more frequent in written language use. Makes sense, we talk a lot about recent years, such as 19xx and 20xx. But you wouldn't type those into a calculator very often.
This is painfully obvious when you use trigraphs. The data are obviously rubbish for informing your average calculator layout.
But you do not enter rounded or artificial data manually (at least you do not, if you are smart and use a Script for rounding and generation).
@Life_is @LambdaDuck @th this discussion arose from old (mechinical) calculator hardware though.
@th This keypad still feels like a lot of progress from this input https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Original_Ohdner_1.jpg
@th I think it would somehow make me worse at math.
@th has @NanoRaptor gone too far?
@th@v.st
There's probably some mechanical reason for it to be like that because there's no way a sane person could ever come up with something this wonky 
@th @NanoRaptor Is that a partially Dvorak-ed numpad? 0 in the centre as it’s the most commonly used?
@th
Is that an encrypting telegraph?!
@dymaxion @th A bit of googling tells me it's a very early typewriter, from the experimental days. Going by this video (turn the sound down and just read the subtitles) it looks like a distant ancestor of the golfball typewriter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozFLYTrU8_w
@Daveosaurus @dymaxion @th oh that's cool! I was kind of expecting it to have a golfball honestly, not a faceted cylinder, but the faceted cylinder makes sense too.
@Daveosaurus @dymaxion @th oh that looks so cool
love the simplicity of the mechanism
the handedness seems odd (assuming everything back then was right-hand only) but maybe it feels different to use than it looks
@th I kind of want one.
@th i saw a video of this working recently, it was so cool. like, i love it.
@th i saw a video of this working recently, it was so cool. like, i love it.
Went on to design ClearCase.
@th ooooh these pointing typewriters are so cool :O
@th literally upper letters
🏳️🌈
@FlorianTischner
Upper case letters for printing presses were literally kept in an upper case, so why not on a typewriter? 😂
@th Wow, I’ve never seen a typewriter like that! I wonder how old it is?
@th aaaahhhh!!! at first I was expecting Linotype keyboard layout when I saw this and my brain threw a wooden shoe into itself when I didn't see the expected etaoin shrdlu pattern
@th yes! I find it interesting the letter frequencies aren't that far different. (At least, I'm guessing that's what the layout is based on.)
@bayindirh @th yea that's the one I'm used to. I had never seen the French layout before
@th I SAID I USED QWERTY. not qwerty.
@th ngl wouldnt mind this last one
@th i am so confused by the lack of 1 and 0. i mean what. why. how
exceedingly #cursed keyboard layout