@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
@th omg this is hilarious
@th
That's why it's called "upper case". :)
@th Interesting evolutionary step: Inspired by the way printers used to have their letter blocks in which explains the terms upper case and lower case letters: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/fit-print-split-level-storage-explains-upper-case-lower-case-letters/
@th still the most upsetting thing about it is that it doesn't have 0 and 1 keys.
@th Smarter. Unbelievably thin. Magical. ™️
@th Imagine turning up to your coworking space and unboxing this absolute unit.
@drj we pranked a colleague a few years ago by replacing their computer with a Model 15 Teletype (that was connected to the serial console so they could still get work done)
@th I used /bin/ed full-screen on an SGI Indigo workstation for a couple of weeks once. I would've loved this. 🤩
@th don’t threaten me with a good time
@th
The Chinese Typewriter, A History (2016) by Thomas S. Mullaney’s
Includes the story of the “Siamese” typewriter that repurposed a version of this extended keyboard because it had ~almost~ enough letters for the Siamese/Thai alphabet
They were about two characters short, so the guy who brought this typewriter to market jettisoned two letters from their alphabet — which to this day nobody uses anymore 😱
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typewriter
Great book:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536103/the-chinese-typewriter/
#NonAccordionContent
@th why cursed? The letters are arranged by usage statistics from the middle out. It looks very quick once you’ve trained for it.
Funny that the character palette looks kind of like a curved Apple Newton screen.
@th This is a tabulator right?
@th I am apparently the kind of person that immediately noticed there has to be a letter missing in a 5x5 grid, so I wondered which one it was. Saw Q, X, and Z pretty quickly, and that made me morbidly wonder what they got rid of instead.
It was J.
Was this not meant for English, then? I don’t know what it would be used for otherwise.
@th on a second look, I found J on the outer rim, so it’s not actually as bad as I thought. But, yes, “cursed” is right.
@IslandUsurper in addition to 'j', there is also the lowercase 'ij' character (for uppercase you would type both I and J)
don't need a capslock key if you have separate caps keys.