A one-of-a-kind book about the history of typing

Shift Happens tells the story of keyboards like no book ever before: 150 years of keys, from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets.

It’s a book about people: Frank McGurrin competing with Mae Orr during the Shift Wars of 1880s; Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs fighting over the future of computers a century later; young Mergenthaler sneaking into a clock tower dreaming of printing; Soviet agents listening to American embassy keystrokes; women pouring into offices eager to do more than typing and re-typing; people wanting to make the best mechanical keyboard today.

It’s also book of surprising connections and unintended consequences. What does Ctrl have to do with JFK’s assassination? Why is Scroll Lock one of the most important keys on your keyboard? Was touch typing a fraud? Was Mr. Dvorak? QWERTY? Why was the worst keyboard ever made actually one of the best ones? Is the best one overrated?

This is the only book that connects the world of typewriters to the universe of computers. It will have something for you whether you’re into vintage typewriters, classic clicky IBM keyboards, or modern mechanical wonders. Are you none of these? Get ready to become a keyboard nerd, and look at an everyday boring QWERTY slab with newfound respect.

This is what the book looks like

I’m really proud of these stats

2

volumes
42

chapters
1,200

pages
1,300

photographs
4

photos of keyboards using Comic Sans
2

custom-made fonts
XX

photos taken exclusively for this book
9

sentences written by AI
30

Easter Eggs hiding in the book
XX

XX
XX

XX
XX

XX

The list of chapters

Hover over any chapter title to see what it’s about!

Volume one

“No tocar, si us plau”
The early years of mingled triumph and disaster
The Shift Wars
The machine you will eventually buy
All the fingers or none
Once mechanical, now digital
The primitive tortureboard
“The monster feels as if it had a certain will of its own.”
Operated by keys alone
The largest pinball machine in the world
QWERTY’s second coming
Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate
When ten bells are not enough
The birth of input
Video killed the teletype star
The flying walnut of 1961
Nobody’s perfect
Every typewriter its own betrayer
Power to the people
Get green on the screen
Now is the time for all good men
Any place except in an office

Volume two

Like fondling a zombie
Mr. Kildall goes flying
God’s own keyboard
An unnatural act to preserve compatibility
How to put a slash in a cell in Excel
The motherfucking Beethoven
The Kangaroo Paw
Delete with force and fury
The tragic fable of the gray big-ass Enter
Trains, planes, and space shuttles
To type, just type
Mavis Beacon is not a real person
Maszynistki i programiści
Perfect for Shrek
To labor less & accomplish more
“Susie has struck the keys once or twice.”
For the love of keyboards
Tracks in new-fallen snow
The keyboard that landed on the Moon
“That is interesting, please continue.”

Make your own Dvorak hands

Fifty years ago, in a 1972 issue of Computers And Automation, Robert Parkinson created a striking visual representing the imbalance on typing of QWERTY as compared to the Dvorak layout.

In chapter 6, I talk about the myths and truths behind QWERTY and Dvorak. But before you get a chance to read it, you can make your own hand visuals by typing, and play with how different layouts come together.

Type or paste here

Try creative writing, typing code, words like “sweaterdresses” or “aftercataracts,” or .

I’m typing using BLAH.
Pretend I’m typing using .

A story of a photo on page 688

Press the right key!

See if you can guess all ten keys (or key combinations)! Just press the keys you think are the right answers to the following questions:

Talk to Eliza

The last chapter of the book covers the history of talking using your fingers, including the early popularity of chatbots like ELIZA. You can talk to ELIZA here yourself, or pit her against a few of later chatbots.

Bot on the left:

Bot on the right:

About me

I’m a designer, writer, and engineer. I currently work at Figma. You might know me as a person who stumbled upon a magical typewriter museum in Spain, obsessed about the underline on Medium, or put Pac-Man on Google’s homepage.

If you’d like to see me speak, a quick Ignite talk about typewriters (5 min) or watch my talk about Command+B (25 min).