Shift Happens book thread

Read, reading, to be read.

(Research for the book. The right pile is likely to grow, still.)

Read, reading, to be read, as of today. The piles are getting two-dimensional!

Read, reading, to be read.

New books ordered just today: 2. But it feels closer and closer!

Read, reading, to be read. Leftmost pile is growing at a *slightly* higher rate than the rightmost one. Can research ever end?

Left pile(s): Read
Right pile: To be read

Giving myself a week to move everything to the left. This will be a fun ride.

It’s happening!

(I particularly like the bi-colour ribbon from one of the books just succumbing to gravity.)

I spent the entire last week retyping and filing relevant passages from all of those books into my database. It ended up being 85K words.

I had no idea I’ll have to type in an extra book’s length in words in the process of writing a book!

(It’s funny how some of the passages I was retyping were about the lost art of retyping.)

And now I’m using my keyboard to write keyboard automation scripts to help me file notes for my book about keyboards.

Laying out my book’s table of contents for the first time and feeling like a troubled conspiracy theorist.

Feel like the most complex puzzle. Sequencing just this – everything that happened between typewriters and PCs – will be a great challenge.

“We’re gonna need a bigger wall.”

*aide leans in to whisper about housing situation in S.F.*

“We’re gonna need smaller sticky notes.”

This is my book, laid out for the first time, in forty-seven chapters/themes.

This feels petrifying (I’m basically looking at 47 blank pages instead of the usual one), but also I’m incredibly excited about it.

I can see it all, now, for the first time ever. I see a chronological spine, interspersed with excursions in all sorts of fun directions.

Tell me you wouldn’t read a book with chapters named:
“Mr. Kildall goes flying”
“Sixty monkeys per second”
“Accidental Vulcan nerve pinch”

So many happy chronological accidents, too, for example the Eisenhower election in 1952 is just two years before first computer keyboard.

(I know this means little when said this way, but that chapter will be *amazing*.)

I’ve heard last week that it’s bad luck to talk about a book before finishing it – maybe I’m just not very superstitious.

I know there will be tons of adjustments and so much hard work to bring it home. (For starters, 47 chapters feels like *way* too many.)

I know there’s a chance none of this will see the light of day. But right now, for the first time, I can see it as a whole, and HOLY SHIT.

(PS Finished the first chapter today. 3,150 words. Hate them all right now, but hey, this is how it works, right…?)

The weird part is that they still feel like my words, not “book-quality” words.

This is both reassuring and petrifying.

Writing, writing, writing… It’s like the biggest puzzle I ever tried to solve.

This is example metadata for a chapter I just finished.

The chapter about arrow keys has Moon landing in it.

The one about keylogging will start with Sully landing the plane in the Hudson.

This has been of my favourite parts of writing so far – making the kinds of connections I suspect no one’s made before.

Just finished a chapter about IBM PC and IBM PCjr keyboards, and feeling so incredibly F ecstatic about it.

(F as in Model F, of course.)

I feel no one told it this way – from Gary Kildall hopping onto his plane, to a fateful conference where reporters mocked the mighty IBM.

Also, tell me this right here is not some serious Pulitzer Prize stuff.

These two extremes I found the most exciting parts of writing so far, fun moments among hours that sometimes don’t feel like fun at all…

…one is assembling a puzzle (book) made of puzzles (chapters) made of puzzles (sections) – while allowing the pieces to shape the whole…

…and another one is, once in a while, writing a sentence that feels like it belongs in a book.

And then realizing *I* wrote it.

Like this one sentence, which perhaps makes little sense without context, but you have no idea how proud I am of these nine words.

The weirdest four books I encountered while researching my book.

I typeset and printed my book proposal as *an actual book*, and this was so much fun.

Even though I still have a lot to write, it’s incredibly rewarding to see it becoming real in this way. (Footnotes! Illustrations!)

I even cut my own font (based on one of @djrrb’s excellent fonts) to depict the keys.

.@djrrb Also, recreated this old style of showing keys in Sketch.

Printing one copy of a book is not so hard, and not really expensive, either. (I explored it last year here: My experiences printing a small batch of books.)

Please keep your fingers crossed for the rest! (And mega thanks to @katelaurielee for her tremendous help in all this.)

Here are some screenshots of me working on the “key font,” which is so much fun, even though I am basically just adding a rounded border.

(It feels like difficulties with styling inline text just follow me from project to project. Also see: Medium underlines.)

Since I haven’t done it in a while…

Even though research ended and writing started months ago, the books keep coming.

The current list of chapter titles; a lot of them written already. Really happy with how some of them turned out so far.

Since I’m writing out of order, after finishing a chapter I need to revisit other chapters and tie them closer together.

Just spent three days immersed in the research of the world of mobile keyboards. Writing tomorrow! (🤓 = done with the folder)

(Let’s see if I can get Optimus keyboards, FingerWorks, rotary phones, BlackBerry, and the iPhone into one coherent story.)

A small/big milestone today: fifteen chapters and 100,000 words done!

Had a privilege today to talk on the phone with someone who used one of the earliest computers, a Univac.

One quote that blew my mind:
“Getting work in government during World War II was easy.”

If you’re wondering the lengths I’ll go to to finish this book… it sometimes entails going through an entire website set in Comic Sans.

Oh my god – this website is not just useful, but it’s from 1999, it has a site counter, and a web ring.

(With love to @internetarchive.)

…and a guestbook to complete the Old Internet trifecta.

20 chapters, 130,000 words. It’ll be interesting/painful to see what happens. It is much more than enough for a book, and I’m not even done.

The pink (finished) sticky notes slowly taking over the orange (unfinished) ones.

What do you think are the most popular words in my (non-paper) database?

Here’s Top 100, non-generic words highlighted. 45M words in total!

A lot of the work is just jumping between three different apps, each one looking exactly the same if you squint.

Sometimes I remember to take a screenshot just before I start writing a new chapter. Here’s a chronological selection:

It’s funny (for me, at least) to notice how I learned I don’t need to be so precious about whitespace and visual noise…

…and having two side-by-side panes (one for writing, the other for notes) is easier than having them in one file and moving above and below.

Also, one thing I learned about my process… starting a new chapter is always painful. Every Single Time, it’s an abyss of a blank page. But:

At least I know it sucked before, many times, and every time I got through it. That knowledge makes it easier to endure.

Just sent my first book newsletter! It’s a thoroughly exciting moment, and I am nervous as hell.

I hate when I *really* want to continue, but my eyes, my brain, and my body are giving up since I have already been writing for five hours…

I powered through it. Seven hours of writing, and I’m exhausted, but I covered the story of computer keyboards coming home.

*drops dead*

I am actually really happy about this. One of my fears when sitting down to this project was: what new can I even add to any of this?

I read so many accounts of the birth of personal computing, from writers like Steven Levy who are way more talented than me.

But I feel good about this chapter. I found a new way to connect all this, centered around the keyboard (and UI in general).

In my research, I found little details that nobody ever mentioned before.

And, I will tell the story of the infamous 1969 Kitchen Computer in a new way I have never seen it being told!

Someone (@OrkneyDullard!) just reminded me of my first truly long-form piece, which I wrote in 2012: Twitter

It felt like such a complex piece, a personal milestone as a writer, and was one of the big building blocks that led to the idea of a book.

When you’re planning for a new chapter and realize you might have a small continuity problem.

Just had to descend into the murky waters of ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite, to recover a timeline of…

…keyboard shortcuts I painstakingly constructed – and then lost owing to a careless use of ⌘X without a matching ⌘V. How deeply ironic.

In February, I posted this sticky note, saying that untangling all of this will be the biggest challenge. Twitter

Today, I finished untangling it, reaching an amazing milestone of finishing the last chapter that ties this whole arc together. (Sic!)

This arc might be the backbone of the book; it’s the story of what happened to keyboards between typewriters and computers today.

Here’s the list of chapters I wrote, and the corresponding titles and keys.

You might recognize a lot of the keys as still on your keyboard, which is why this is so exciting – each era influenced where we are today.

I’ve never seen anyone talk about it this way, and I always wanted to. Now I can. And, I suppose, I just did. :·)

More chapters have been written, and more will have to be. I still need to write the tough ones about QWERTY, ergonomics, and sexism…

…but this, *this* thing, this milestone, this feels incredible right now.

And tomorrow, I’m taking a day off. \õ/

BTW if you’re reading this thread and don’t want to miss the book announcements – sign up for the newsletter! Shift Happens newsletter

This was so pleasurable, by the way – learning all of this myself, just so I can explain it to my readers.

Show me that February sticky note now, and I can draw all the lines connecting everything in proper order, and tell you all about it.

On the other hand, pouring through legal documents was the least fun I had ever since sitting through the cringeworthy/sexist DEFCON talks.

Getting deep into ergonomics papers, and my apartment walls once in a while hear a loud “wow” as I learn new fascinating things.

Fascinating/depressing subject I didn’t even know existed until today: the sociopolitical aspects of RSI epidemic in Australia in the 1980s.

Interviews are hard, for me at least. They are stressful. Exhausting. I’m often disappointed in myself for not knowing how to ask questions.

But sometimes a really great one happens. It did today! It blew my mind. You have no idea how exciting the story of RSI/ergonomics will be.

(I didn't know myself just a few ago, which makes it seem even more of a great discovery that I can't wait to share more widely.)

(Go, go, little OCR recognition engine, go. Help me out. Tell me the secrets of the 1926 work of German keyboard ergonomic specialists.)

This is the most heartbroken I’ve been working on this book. Never been so anxious copy/pasting passages into Google Translate.

Untangling the most difficult chapter so far. Please wish me luck.

Celebrating finishing the most difficult chapter so far with the ritual of replacing an orange sticky note with an aggressive neon-pink one.

The sticky wall today vs. when I started. So many aggressive neon-pink notes, but still quite a few orange ones.

Trying to decipher notes for the next chapter I left for myself in the dark at the dead of night is exactly like that one Seinfeld episode.

What! This is way better than what I actually wrote. Twitter

Simeon knows too much. Twitter

The book brought me back to school! Taking a few classes at UC Berkeley to see how workplace ergonomics is being taught today.

A somewhat pretentious, highly idealized, intensely colour-coördinated portrait of a writer’s desk (right after the writer cleaned it up).

Who knew looking into typewriter-related crimes for the next chapter will bring me to a certain young, ambitious California congressman…

Coming up with chapter titles continues to be a rather difficult, but fun task.

Here’s a list of books that influence(d) my book: Books that are influencing my book

(Also a very nice reading list.)

The modern typewriter was invented between 1867–1873 at Kleinsteuber’s machine shop at 318 State Street in Milwaukee…

…I was in the middle of writing a chapter about it, when I completely by accident found myself traveling to Chicago for the weekend…

…and realized Milwaukee is not very far away! So I woke up at 5am this morning, rented a car, and drove up there.

This is me writing part of the chapter about the birthplace of the typewriter AT THE PLACE WHERE IT WAS BORN, exactly 150 years later!

It was kind of incredible to bring a 2017 QWERTY keyboard to where the original was being made, a century-and-a-half ago.

(The building no longer exists, so I sat on the ground. After a weekend of miserable weather, the sun came out literally minutes later.)

There’s only a (crooked) plaque nearby.

I am exhausted right now, but this was a perfect little moment.

Something kind of nice just happened. I needed to re-read a few chapters I wrote all the way back in May…

…to make sure they will connect with what I’m writing next. And I was surprised how much fun I had reading them.

The distance of time made it feel like reading someone else. And it was fun. And I actually learned new things. (Well, re-learned.)

Writing has become harder in recent months, but this experience helped a bit to find energy for the last dozen chapters.

If I enjoyed reading those, chances are other people might, too.

Excited about writing the next chapter: a stroll through the Typewriter Row in 1910’s New York, speed typing contests, and a tearful ending.

Interesting challenge to set up a walking tour of a place 110 years back in time. I didn’t know New York’s Broadway had cable cars then!

PSA

I actually have keyboard dreams now, sometimes.

Sitting down to write the most difficult chapter yet (about sexism around typewriting and computing). Please wish me luck!

Unforeseen challenges of unexpectedly interesting phone interviews.

Two evocative photos for tomorrow’s chapter about portable keyboards, where Corona typewriter (WWI) meets a ThinkPad (Space Shuttle).

The sun did this as I was writing today.

If starting a new chapter is consistently the worst part of writing, the feeling tonight is one of the best: I wrote most of a chapter today, and tomorrow is just riding the momentum and finishing it.

As I’m nearing the completion of the first draft, the reference book piles loom higher and higher.

(left = today, right = when I started)

Trying to keep sane with a few related side projects that are not just about writing. Testing a brand new one. The next newsletter is going to be something special!

80% done towards the first draft. Today’s chapter was awful: writing for eight hours through a headache, ended up with what feels like plodding, incoherent mess.

But I suppose that’s good. Done is better than perfect, and so on. What’s awful to write is not always awful to read – plus, even if so, things can be made better in future revisions.

Or, in other words… Twitter

In “Internet can still be good sometimes” news, I am having an email conversation with someone who actually used this 1959 Italian computer: Twitter

He sent me the computer’s manual (!!!), which I’m trying to understand via Google Translate. (And already uploaded to Internet Archive: Olivetti Elea 9003 Manuale Base Di Programmazione / Programming manual)

I’m now at ten chapters left (including the intro and outro!), so I am doing A GIANT COUNTDOWN TO THE FIRST DRAFT.

I will celebrate each chapter with a PR stratagem of posting a selfie with a keyboard I own. I don’t really do selfies, ever, so this will be… new.

🔟!!!

By the way, as I’m doing the necessary research, I am absolutely falling in love with Chinese and Japanese, and the histories behind their writing systems. I had no idea. You could spend your whole life studying those, and it would be a life well spent.

Whoa, I just managed to write “weather” in Japanese using a romaji keyboard, a hiragana keyboard, and by drawing the kanji shapes directly on my trackpad. It took me a few hours to get there, giving me a net speed of about… 0.02 wpm. But I feel rather accomplished! AMA.

When I started working on this book, I had no idea I would end up in a Cyber Monday shopping guide – particularly before the book is even finished! Your super local, very SF Cyber Monday guide 0_O

9️⃣!!!

(The amazing Seiko UC-2100 keyboard. I wish I had the watch that goes with it: The Seiko UC-2000 Wrist PC: An Awkward ’80s Attempt To Live The Cyborg Life)

In today’s book adventures: Renting a typewriter!

So at a house party yesterday, someone used my Canon Cat to write a story in which I was a… dragon, complete with a drawing. The cat itself makes an appearance, too.

I basically could not be happier right now.

(Yes, it was a keyboard-themed party. Another friend wrote the beginning of a screenplay with a literal cliffhanger.)

The log of my friends trying all sorts of keyboards connected to my computer this weekend reads like someone rather quickly losing their mind.

Just scanned three hundred pages of a doctoral thesis on the typewriter industry. My left arm hurts. Will upload to Internet Archive in a few days.

(Huge thanks to the amazing Prelinger Library for allowing me to use their scanner!)

After a careless introduction of a key puller at my party my precious writing keyboard looks like this now. The red key is not even the right profile and is sticking out… but I’m embracing this for the next chapter. We’ll see if it has much less of the letter “n” than others.

Learning that how I feel *before* writing a chapter can be unrelated to how I feel *while* writing it.

Struggled so much with coming up with structure for this one and dreaded it, and yet it is so much fun to write – plus, of course, I completely changed the structure already.

0_O

(The perils of being a historian of a young industry. Asked a German institution about the DIN keyboard standards of the early 1980s.)

8️⃣ chapters to go!!!

(The selfie is me by the inimitable IBM Correcting Selectric II from 1973 that deserves its own chapter… and it’ll get one.)

I have been dreading writing the chapter about QWERTY and Dvorak for months. But now that it’s next on the docket, I find myself really excited to tackle it. Perhaps going through other tough chapters emboldened me, or perhaps there’s a huge element of randomness to all this.

it me

(An illustration for an article about the future of books. Popular Computing, November 1985. Illustrator: Kent Smith.)

Partly eager to finish the first draft just so I could run some statistical analysis on what I wrote.

Having conversations with myself a year ago (or, celebrating how much I learned in the interim).

Okay, tomorrow’s The Big One. The trickiest of all chapters: All the myths and truths of QWERTY and Dvorak.

I spent so much time researching this. The notes alone are 14,000 words. Here’s the lists of all my to-dos, and an already serious batch of title contenders. Let’s go.

(Not just 14,000 words of notes. I also wrote a 7,000-word scaffolding document that’s basically an FAQ from myself to myself about what I learned about all this – and a test whether I can answer simple questions like “Did QWERTY slow people down”?)

(But it’s just facts, and no narrative. Over the next two days, I’m turning all this into a fact-based, but also hopefully *enthralling* story of three separate inventors dying unhappy, having lost to QWERTY – including the very person who invented QWERTY.)

Oh, oh! Another thing. This is August Dvorak; it’s surprisingly hard to find photos of him.

(I’m also trying to get in touch with his family, but it’s hard – mostly since I don’t know how to.)

I want to say more about this moment – not just to savior it (which I promised myself to do as often as possible on this project), but also to share with anyone’s reading, in case you wonder about embarking on a parallel journey.

It feels… actually profound to realize that at this moment in time, I might be the best equipped person to untangle the mysteries of QWERTY and Dvorak. And I mean, really. Worldwide.

It doesn’t mean someone else cannot make smarter connections, work harder, employ more statistical analyses, or discover unknown documents. (God, I hope someone does, since I will learn from them then.)

It also doesn’t mean I can’t for sure fuck this up.

But right now, I feel I’m the person that can tell this whole story better than anyone else ever before, this story that eluded many experts. It’s a really great feeling.

And the best part to share: I didn’t get here because I have access to secrets, or because I’m particularly clever. I just really, *really* wanted to figure it out, and I believe I did this using tools and resources that most other people have.

Taking a short break from writing to validate a keyboard layout hypothesis…

Why don’t *you* try to write some recursive code and then I’ll judge you, Firefox.

Chrome went… a different way.

7️⃣ to go!!!

To celebrate writing about QWERTY/Dvorak, I apparently turned myself into a Dvorak typewriter robot. (Turns out, I have no idea how to take selfies.)

As a writer I’m supposed to be good with words, so with a mild embarrassment I’m reporting that it took me *two solid days* to realize people saying “progamers” was not a typo for “programmers,” but rather a shortening of “professional gamers.”

In my defense, there’s a huge overlap between keyboards for professional gamers and programmers.

(Also, a chapter title “Programmers and pro-gamers” has a nice ring to it.)

6️⃣ chapters to go!

Here’s me with the Cambridge Z88 (lent by @scottjenson) and an appropriately British background.

One of my favourite moments in this process is when what seems like a forgettable artifact reveals its actual incredible meaning – but only once you look closer and put time in getting to know it.

This is a 1928 thesis about typewriting errors, by Gertrude Ford.

On the surface it looks pretty boring… but this is the actual research that inspired a certain August Dvorak to try to reinvent the keyboard. I just got a rare copy of it from the University of Washington!

Also, it bothered me it was so rare, so I just scanned it and put it on Internet Archive: A study of typewriting errors (common errors in typewriting)

Just finished another one, and now it’s just 5️⃣ chapters remaining.

This is my poor Olivetti Praxis 48 with a spacebar broken in half. (I might 3D print a replacement one day!)

For the chapter I’m starting to write today, I am tying Enigma, stenography, and assistive keyboards. If you’re thinking “are those really related?”, I have the same doubts. I guess I’ll find out as I’m writing…?

Had to split it into two chapters in the end. Wrote both via 11,000 words during the last two days, which is some sort of a personal record that I never want to repeat.

So, 4️⃣. This is me with the worst keyboard I ever wrote on.

ᴵ ᵃᵐ ˢᵒ ᵉˣʰᵃᵘˢᵗᵉᵈ

An unintentional moment of irony.

As of today, my first draft has both Clinton and Trump in it. Guess which one of them is treated with respect, and which one with cutting subtext.

An unexpectedly satisfying part of writing is making mini-timelines like these ones.They’re sometimes frustrating to piece together (I basically had to rent many old Microsoft Word help books on Internet Archive today), but they help a lot in straightening the story.

3️⃣ to go!

This is a keyboard I actually made. It only outputs spaces. Since this is my first keyboard, I call it a “space cadet keyboard.”

I might actually be done with the first draft in a week which is… surreal.

A theme from one of my many, many folders: Languages did never not change, and we did never not worry about them changing.

Just now, for the first time, I put together in my head the words that will end my book. It was a surprisingly emotional moment. (They might still change, but it doesn’t matter.)

Things I didn’t expect to be doing while writing this book: helping the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum identify a teleprinter keyboard that was used in the Washington–Moscow cold war hotline.

So.

0️⃣

Yes, I’m not kidding. I just finished writing.

(I… I don’t know what to say. I’ll follow this up with something more useful/interesting/poignant/whatever – eventually – but… I just finished writing.)

Some first draft stats! Each key I mention at least three times, word count, and specific word battles.

(If you like those, there’ll be quite a few more + commentary in the new newsletter in a week or so: Shift Happens newsletter)

There’s still a lot of work ahead – rewriting, editing, production, publishing – and still many unknowns, but I don’t think anything that follows will require nearly as much effort as this first draft.

(Please don’t stop sending me interesting keyboard-related things you stumble upon!)

It’s funny how the pile of the books I still want to read *alone* is larger than all the books I had when I started. (Although, to be fair, the remaining books are much more specific – they might just have one or two details I want.)

…and here’s the guide to the sticky wall, then and now.

(It’s a nice and fun way to see the entire book at once, and designed to see important large-scale patterns. I can imagine it will be even more useful when editing.)

Oh! I never shared this. My every single keyboard-related tweet and thread are all collated here. Basically tons of fun for the whole family: Twitter

And, the last issue of the newsletter with tons of fun stats about the first draft: The Italian senate survival manual

Searching for one particular article about German ergonomic laws led me to a library in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by beautiful trees.

Ah, what a beast. This is all the new materials that came my way in just the fortnight since I finished the first draft.

Today I’m writing down all the things that were good/fun and all the things that were hard/scary about writing so far. Partly for myself as reflection, partly to share in the next newsletter.

Any specific questions? Please let me know!

Just discovered a Selfies folder on my phone. This is what it looks like.

And now I made my first Instagram hashtag just for this one event that keeps happening as I am writing…

Instagram

I’ve become a keyboard detective! Please send me more keyboard challenges. Twitter

This is so fun. A Japanese transit museum sent me back a printed and annotated photo of a very specific keyboard, after I asked them about it.

Really love when people send me even tiny keyboard photos and observations. I appreciate each and every one of those!

Twitter

Just sent out my latest book newsletter, which includes links to longer essays about what I found amazing, and what I found scary and unpleasant while writing the first draft of the book: Bigger in Japan

(Also, keyboards in Japan, obvi.)

Dedicating this weekend to reading my manuscript from cover to cover for the first time ever. I suspect this will be really tough – seeing all the many warts I know exist, any many I don’t – but there’s no way around it.

(Also, it’s really fun to say “my manuscript.” Someone just reminded me that’s the right word to use.)

The funniest/most embarrassing mistake I found in my book so far: writing “Scott Glenn” (the actor famous for portraying an astronaut in the movie The Right Stuff) when I meant to write “David Scott,” the, you know, actual Moon-landing astronaut. 😬

A little over two years ago, I decided to try giving a 5-minute Ignite talk about keyboards, to see if there is any interest in people hearing these stories – and if I’m any good at it. It was sort of a trial balloon. It went well. (You can watch it here: “Shift Happens” Ignite talk, 2016)

This month, I gave a 40-minute talk that was just basically *one chapter of my book,* and it went… even better. And that makes me excited. There are clearly so many stories here, and it is possible to share them in interesting ways.

Also, yes, I read the first draft! It was a rather unusual experience. It was at times really hard, and at times very delightful. It felt simultaneously old and new. I knew all of what I read (by definition), but I also *learned* some new things from it – from my own writing!

The beginning was really rough and made me worried, but things picked up after that. (The ending felt amazing and made me really happy. They were both written on the same day. Go figure.)

Funny thing: I used some words I forgot since, and I had to look up! (Example: “sash.”)

Funny thing, also: It’s fascinating to read a book and be able to *rewrite parts you don’t like* while doing it.

Or, leave a TK. I left tons of TKs in all caps; here’s an abridged list out of context (and an example in context, in case you’re curious).

Funny thing, once more: You could have a drinking game with my cavalier use of the crutch word “simply.” I repeated that word 280 times throughout the book – present in every chapter but one, with a record *nineteen* appearances in the chapter about RSI. 🙄

Good news, though: The chapters I wrote later in the process were so much better. That means, I think, I’m becoming better at this, right…?

Next stops? Need to rewrite a bunch of things towards the second manuscript, including the beginning. (I have tons of TKs inside, and notes outside.) Then, show it to more people.

These icons make sense to me today. But I’m pretty sure that won’t be the case tomorrow.

On a completely unrelated thread, someone just showed me this fascinating keyboard I’ve never heard of. I believe that at this point in my life EVERYTHING WILL SOONER OR LATER CONNECT TO KEYBOARDS.

Twitter

Case in point: I just plotted a drive to a park I had bookmarked for years. I zoom in to see where the Google Maps route drops me off and I see… a keyboard maker. 0_O

I just randomly stumbled upon photos of trial title slides for the first talk I ever gave about keyboards, internally at Medium in 2014. (The last one was what I went with.)

…which nicely dovetails into something a friend just sent to me, which is *holy crap amazing* and one more great reason to finish the book. (Not that I already don’t have a few…)

Unexpected part of writing the book: testing different microphones for recording my voice and also the sound of keystrokes.

Rewrote the opening chapter today, and then played a bit with Blender to see if I can render a nice key. Still a lot of improvements to be made, but could be an interesting visual option.

Okay, something amazing just happened. I peeked into one chapter to check something – the one about teletypes and terminals – started reading it and… couldn’t put it down.

I couldn’t put down my own book!

(This is… not a familiar feeling, or something I really know how to even wrap my head around.)

Finished the second draft! Rewrote the opening and the ending, rearranged the most confusing things, cleaned up tons of small challenging bits.

This is the first version of the book I’d be happy to show to people in its entirety. 😬

Also, it’s fun to see the style guide taking shape.

Unexpected benefit of writing a book – creating an RTF to HTML converter.

(I’m not sarcastic. I’ve always been curious. What a weird format it’s been so far.)

This might seem like the most ridiculous manual approach, but this way I will know exactly which special characters are in the book – and be ready to make sure they’re eventually typeset properly.

Also, fun to see a good ol’ manicule right next to the only emoji in my book.

I was recently on @mathowie’s awesome podcast Hobby Horse, talking about Pac-Man, the Phelan Building, Medium, and – chiefly – the sequence of events that led to the keyboard book, and where am I with it today.

Twitter

The project’s become difficult again – so it goes – and America is breaking my heart, so this milestone feels hollow, and yet: For the first time, I sent the book in its entirety for someone to read and give me feedback. Egads!

Also, I made this modern web reading environment for it, and it was exciting to see the book in a different livery for the first time.

I’ve so far only known it in Scrivener, typeset in Tisa Pro… but here it is in the beloved Mercury Text (and some Maison Neue strewn around).

(I also set up my first virtual server and wrote my first Node server app in the process, which was a classic “use something you have to do as an excuse to learn something new” scenario.)

Also, this numero is so, so gorgeous.

I like that its presence tells a story: there in all the early chapters, talking about typewriters like Remington №2 and Underwood №5; gone later, since we stopped using it.

But tell me that “iPhone №10” doesn’t have a nice ring to it.

Discouraging to send an editor specific documents saying why there is no book like this one, and comparing it to all the existing books about typewriters… only to hear her say “I took a look at Amazon, there are a million books that try to do the same thing.”

*A million books.*

BTW hilariously that numero above is not from the font I chose for text… but from Times. Times! It’s awesome to know even an old, worn down typeface still can hold a few surprises.

Preparing example spreads for a potential publisher, imagining this book as a full-colour 8"×10" volume.

This is starting to feel rather real!

Update on the book piles! One is really trying to make a run for it.

Not going to lie: making mock-ups like these where I know the text is real, and photos will be, is SUPER fun.

First (printed) prototype of my book, with a temporary cover, and no photos – but every single word of the text all there.

Already with tons of sticky notes for all the things I noticed that need fixing.

You know what was surprisingly emotional? Seeing a table of contents with page numbers, and then being able to go to that page and just… start reading.

A friend of mine was leafing through it on Friday and said “every time I go to another random page I see something interesting.” ^_^

In the meantime, adding a new keyboard recorder to my 20-plus-year-old awful Pascal code just in time for tomorrow’s newsletter: Shift Happens newsletter

(I’ve never before written Pascal while having internet a keystroke away to answer any questions I could had.)

In an old catalogue, yet another illustration that seems to perfectly summarize my life.

(Previous one: Twitter)

An amazing benefit of being loud about the book writing process is that people volunteer little anecdotes and stories like this delightful one: A propos of nothing…

I am often amazed and often overwhelmed by the range and scope of tasks necessary to write this book, particularly since I’m also aiming to typeset and design it.

This is an example of just one to-do branch I had to traverse today. There are so many more – and I’d lie if I said I fully understand the shape of the entire giant tree.

Going back and forth between “the writing part” (strategy) and some, incredibly tactical nuance can be a real challenge.

Small tasks provide respite and a sense of accomplishment, but there come in infinite amounts and for a detail-oriented person can easily completely take over.

Dealing with larger questions is necessary, but it often feels vague and comes without a progress bar.

Today, in the process of getting someone to help me figure out big strategic editing questions, I had to build a Python typesetter *inside a font creating program* to help me create a key font. Otherwise, making 517 necessary glyphs would take an infinite amount of time.

It’s a very complicated and large to-do tree, and I keep jumping from one faraway branch to another.

I’m not saying it’s bad or even that I know how to do it any other way – but sometimes it’s hard to even wrap my head around what’s going on.

My newsletter has become an unexpected forcing function he: every ~50 days I need to step back and give a succinct update.

(Also! many thanks and kudos to @djrrb for allowing me to play with the pre-release variable font version of his excellent typeface Output!)

I was at the Computer History Museum today and my keyboard research allowed me to give some advice and background to the IBM 1620 restoration team (which seems awesome), and now I really feel like a historian!

If I never had much nostalgia for analogue photography, this might be why: with digital, I can get from farm to table within 10 minutes. It’s almost too much fun.

(This is just a test spread. I don’t imagine this particular keyboard making it into the book.)

My lord, I have enough photos of keyboard diagrams that my iPhone thinks a keyboard is a *person in my life*.

And when I tap Show Faces, it just creepily zooms in on one random key.

(Sigh.)

Even grocery store Q-tips are trolling me. Goddamn Q-TIPS.

Unexpectedly giddy about completely randomly stumbling online upon three pages typewritten in 1880s on the first (popular) typewriter, the famed Sholes & Glidden. It has been incredibly rare to see anything coming from that typewriter, particularly in actual casual use.

It’s a good night for research.

Jumped through many journals (Boston Medical and Surgical Journal » The Lancet » The Birmingham Medical Review) to finally find the detailed description of the first recorded case of RSI, then named “type-writer’s cramp,” from 1898. Thrilling.

At the public library: “So you’re the guy who orders all those typewriter books.”

Amazed (and a bit frightened) that I’m still learning of new keyboards and so on pretty much every week.

Embarking on a preservation mission. Wish me luck!

Wouldn’t be research without some microfilm!

Genuinely so thrilling to find some really amazing books on the subject, long after I thought I’ve seen them all.

(I mean, two hundred plus pages on Japanese keyboards, some of the most fascinating keyboards ever! 😍)

(I am literally going to stay up late for this.)

This book is SO GOOD. It’s like traveling to Japan again, except now with a time machine.

(cc @craigmod)

PS in my latest newsletter, another amazing keyboard-related trip that I was lucky to have accidentally instigated: A time machine behind the cypress trees

(In the middle of reading a book about Japanese word processors and their keyboards, a Japanese word processor and its keyboard materialized themselves on my desk.)

I suspect when you dig deep enough, you will always find something at even the most unusual intersection of a bunch of your interests.

Here it is for me: a 1990 ad I just discovered that’s ⅓ keyboards, ⅓ typography, and ⅓ education.

This moment of research is always very fun.

1483.00 ELECTRONIC DESIGN
V. 30, 1-12
Jan. 7-June 10, 1982
(May Career Extra, Index)
Reel 1 of 3
University Microfilms International
Duplicate Negative

(If you’re curious what I’m researching, it’s the early days of mechanical keyboards. If this looks interesting, DM me and I’ll send you ~200 of these.)

I learned today there’s a difference between microfiche and microfilm.

Took a 90-year-old thesis that spent last 60 years on a shelf somewhere in Cincinnati for a ferry ride in California – and it rewarded me with gorgeous vulgar fractions that used to be on every keyboard, but disappeared long ago.

We are now on a vintage Italian trolley for a final ride back to the library.

PLOT TWIST: Even the trolley has a keyboard.

Returned the thesis to be sent back to its home and likely never ever again leave its shelf, except PLOT TWIST I also scanned it so you can all read it now:

The Remington Rand consolidation (thesis)

Walking past library stacks, on a lark I randomly picked up a volume of Time and then let it open wherever it wanted.

Of course it was something related to keyboards.

Uploading scanned papers to @internetarchive while waiting to board my plane like a goddamn *pro.*

…and I immediately spent whatever karma I gained by finding an accessible keyboard with a nice 16-segment display.

My interurban bus got pulled over by German police earlier today (routine Schengen Area passport control, it turned out) and I’m immediately like “oooh, what is that keyboard?”

Some great news on the book front, and momentum – after many months of feeling stuck. (Still a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work needing to be done, but I feel I understand what that will be, at least.)

One interesting thing about collating a lot of information about a single subject over time is that you see fun patterns, e.g.

Here’s another one (and this is all just tweets that appeared in my timeline or were shared with me without searching):

Or, in a very different realm…

(And this, in turn, connected to…)

😍

(I have gotten some great comments on my book from a few people who read the current draft. Not just positive, of course. :·) Will credit them and give more of an update when the smoke clears!)

When a librarian makes your day.

That time of year where you have to split a book tower into two smaller book towers to prevent a collapse.

Oh, lord. Remember the fictional character of Jessie K. Board (which was my iPhone AI misidentifying many keyboard photos as an actual person)? Twitter

Now iPhone suggests sharing new keyboard photos with that person.

Is this god telling me “you’ve gone too far with this keyboard stuff.”

These are also photos iOS thinks are of keyboards. It’s actually pretty hilarious!

I suspected the day would come where in my research I’d stumble upon a thing Google knows nothing about.

Major surgery on a few troubled chapters. This is a bit scary; as much writing as rampant copying and pasting, and the feeling I won’t fully know how it all worked out until I re-read it with fresh eyes in a few weeks.

Just wrote the opening chapter from scratch again for the third time. I’m genuinely curious how many times it’s going to take, in the end.

Dig deep enough and you will find a (pretty weird) keyboard even in an office espresso machine.

Guess who I interviewed today! All the clues are in the photo. ^_^

Felt very accomplished with rewriting today. Combined two chapters into one chapter with half the words; it feels leaner *and* I embedded it more into the chronology *and* I centered it all around a cool new person.

Ten most cursed folders in my keyboard research database.

True story: my iPhone just autocorrected “was” to WASD.

I didn’t expect there to be secret documents in the area of keyboard research.

All these is what Artificial Intelligence thinks are keyboards. (The last one is both hilarious and inspired.)

These kinds of small moments of preservation make me really happy. Here is a booklet from late 19th century you can all read with me:

Remington Typewriter Furniture (brochure)

Very happy with how the latest book newsletter issue turned out, even though I accidentally almost destroyed my camera while filming me typing on the one keyboard in my apartment that’s not meant for typing.

Lucky 13!

The Italian senate survival manual

Spot an interloper in my new update to the “book skyline.”

Mark your calendars!

I got this on eBay for very little. I think it hides a really cool 1990s keyboard, but I’m only going to open it up when I’m finished with the third draft of the book.

Also, I might do an unboxing video. Let me know if you’d watch such a thing?

A very nice Twitter moment where a bunch of people came together to solve a little keyboard mystery: Twitter

Had it on the docket today to rewrite a chapter a certain way, only to discover *I have already done that at some point.* 0_O

Started a five-day effort this morning to finish the third draft. Wish me luck!

One of the many fun moments in this process: chatting with Hartmut Esslinger about why computers became beige/grey, how many shades of beige/grey are there (more than I expected), and what role did keyboards play in all this.

Just a romantic photo of a sun setting on new research.

(It’s one of my favourite parts: finding and reading through the most obscure books on the subject.)

First I discover a keyboard on a cable car, and today my spying resulted in discovering a keyboard in the cable car *barn* as well.

(A CNC machine, I think?)

So close! Just one more tricky chapter to rewrite, plus a handful of to-do items and TKs to cover.

FINISHED THE THIRD DRAFT!!!!!!!!!

Didn’t cut as much as I wanted, plus there are probably at least two more drafts to do… but I don’t want to think about this now. The book is getting better and better, and for some time at least I can focus on visuals, instead of writing. :·)

Buy my book (eventually) to understand this cryptic conversation! Twitter

How is your evening going?

A shot of a key being photographed from something close to the perspective of a key is a bit frightening!

(The box on the left is propping up an old iPhone serving as a light source.)

My book is now leading me to some heavy interlibrary drama and intrigue!

That feeling when you persevere, and finally find the photo you want – and then realize it was hard to find because of a *typo*.

Interlibrary chase continues!

Number of tabs opened in Chrome right now: 688. Most are related to the book and the visual research. I should probably start processing/closing some down? 0_O

Just another day in keyboard research land!

(Art direction and photo by @neobarnabas.)

My friend @GlennF pointed out August Dvorak’s grave (in Seattle) kind of looks like a split keyboard. 0_O

Slowly, but surely: working on the visual side of the book.

I forgot how much I love emulators.

I was scanning a few photos today from a 1920s sales newsletter for Royal Typewriter Company for my book, and – since it took some effort to actually get it – I thought it would be nice to preserve *all* of it.

Scanning the oversized volumes on the library’s small scanners seemed like days of work.

Instead, I set up a tripod with my iPhone in the library, grabbed my little Bluetooth remote.

Only a little over an hour later, I had all 376 pages photographed.

I even took photos of white pieces of paper to see where the shadows were, and used it as a mask to fix uneven lights in the library.

And now five years of Royal Standard – 50,000+ words – are on Internet Archive for anyone to read: Royal Typewriter Company, Inc. search

(Sure, this is not the best quality possible, but much better than nothing – particularly since I also OCR’ed all the text, making it searchable.)

I love feeling like a good historian/preservationist! And there are so many tiny things there that mean a lot, for example this “Royal progress in Poland”: The Royal Standard 1924/9 (magazine)

(I know I haven’t sent many book updates recently, but I’ve been working hard on the typesetting and particularly visuals.

Over 200 photos are already in the book, and I’m proud of many of them that I found, and some that I took.

My goal is to send a newsletter within days!)

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of an awesome Typewriter Car.

Preparing for (tomorrow’s?) newsletter!

A portrait of a person slowly losing their mind in the infinite number of typesetting details.

Four years ago, I wrote a Medium post about the Turkish typewriter. I wonder if without that post – and the positive reception to it – I would’ve ever embarked on my book project.

I’m taking photos of that typewriter for the book today, and it feels like meeting a patron saint.

My newsletter is at 992 subscribers now – so close to 1,000!!!

(Please sign up for fun keyboard stories, updates on book production, previews, and be the first to know when the book is ready!)

Shift Happens newsletter

Yes!!!

🤷‍♂️

Should I change my name y/n

It’s been hard to read other books for a while now. As I read, my mind keeps going to either “ah, this is nice, will people be so engrossed in my book?” or “this is so much better than what I’ve done.”

Then, I keep pausing to write down new ideas, or places to rewrite, or turns of phrases to steal.

And even without any of the above, I keep noticing typographical or typesetting details, and wondering about those, too.

(For example, I am trying to read “A burglar’s guide to the city” and just spent 5 minutes wondering whether these decorative paragraph breaks were cute or not, as my eyes blindly followed sentences without my brain registering anything.)

Always happy when I can take what seem like an unsalvageable photo, and through the magic of Lightroom and Photoshop turn it into an okay one.

Spent most of today photographing keyboards from @keyboardio’s collection. (For the book.)

After I was done, I realized I photographed 56 (!) keyboards.

Also, sometimes the best part of the keyboard is its connector.

Fun fact: Each keyboard received, on average, 670 megapixels.

#caturday with a sweet cat in my lap

I woke up early to visit a faraway library before work, and scan one particular photo for the book. I grabbed the volume, and it opened at the exact very page that had the photo I wanted. 😮

2007-2019

(The original iPhone courtesy @jfire.)

As much as I love words and writing, taking a nice photo of an important artifact brings me as much joy.

This is today’s book-bound photo of quite possibly the best keyboard ever made.

Had fun at the keyboard meetup in San Jose today!

I keep coming back to this photo: four generations of people in awe of the Space Cadet keyboard (I’m assuming for very different reasons).

Knowing what seem like more impressive keyboards, I don’t fully understand the enduring appeal of Space Cadet… but it’s undeniable.

Huh. This turned out kind of nice.

In following another thread, I found an excellent photo of an overlay on top of a keyboard – among the best I’ve ever seen. I got really excited and immediately wanted to contact the photographer.

Then I realized *I* took this photo, thirteen years ago:
Old Flight Simulator (with EGA)

Can you afford to miss this week’s newsletter and learn what on the earth is this supposed to be?

That’s right, I didn’t think so.

Sign up here if you haven’t already! Shift Happens newsletter

Today my worlds collided – historical research for the book was helpful in figuring out a weird bug at work: pressing Shift+numpad 2 wasn’t working on Windows.

(Hilariously, the person I was referring to complained that this secret feature was already poorly understood and documented by mid-1980s. And here were are in very, very late 2010s, and it’s still rearing its ugly head.)

The glamour of book writing: endless days on your couch cleaning up images in Photoshop while rewatching TV + cleaning a gross typewriter to prepare for a photo… in your bed, because you ran out of floor space.

Also, somehow there is also a vintage BlackBerry in my bed! I have no recollection of this.

Compiling a list of acknowledgements for my book and getting… unexpectedly emotional? So many great people who’ve generously helped me, and on so many levels, too. Thank you.

(I know I haven’t updated this thread in a while, but I’ve been spending last many months working on the visual side of the book. It’s hard to talk about it and not show anything – but showing things would be spoiling things!

Still, I have So Many Great Photos for the book. I’m really excited for you to see them. And this part of the work should be finally done within weeks… and then the next newsletter comes!)

After some encouragement – here are four spreads.

There are hundreds more. :·)

The sticky wall is back! Now tracking finalizing the visuals for each chapter. (Green sticky instead of pink in the first column.) Each chapter is ~90% done, so it’ll happen pretty quickly. Two so far!

Almost didn’t go to @TypeThursdaySF this week (tired), but so glad I did: someone presented a fascinating project where a typewriter was modified to simplify its letterforms and then create semigraphics-like art. It was so good. I have never seen anything like this before.

The book pile isn’t growing as quickly as it used to (which makes sense), but it’s still growing!

(Note the sign that I made at a sign-making/lettering class five years ago – the book not even an idea yet – which became something of a secret motto/rallying cry.)

Had a little collaborative Figma/Zoom session yesterday with my good friend @sall to figure out the section breaks in my book. If you’ve seen them done elsewhere or have favourite treatments, please let me know!

Here’s our (wonderfully) messy file.

Just removed 171 ellipses from my book. Apparently… I really love ellipses.

(Next stop: getting rid of “simply” and a lot of the unnecessary italicization for emphasis.)

“Simply” went from 204 to 49 occurrences.

(BTW when the book is published, I am planning to release all the drafts, too, so people interested in writing process can check them out!)

I haven’t been giving updates on the book much outside of my newsletter, but! Fifth prototype arrived today. It’s pretty much all the words and all the photos. I feel pretty happy about it!!!

Fun fact: There are 26 Easter eggs in the book. I don’t know what that says about anything.

There are over a 1,000 photos in this prototype and they *all* look good and they are *all* chosen deliberately and they *all* help to tell the story. Today this is the thing I’m most proud of.

It’s not even that there are things in the book that are pretty rare, and good photos of which never graced the Internet. The book will also have realistic 3D renders of things that couldn’t be shown before, or renders of keyboards that are no longer with us.

BTW my promise! Some time after the book launch, I will release tons of PDFs of work in progress/prototypes for people interested – and I will also put all the photos I took for the book on Wikimedia Commons, for everyone to use.