Chapter 2 – the Keyboard

Chapter 2 – The Keyboard The transcription of language, the conversion of verbal to written, has always been an artistic endeavor. It’s difficult to take brush or pen in hand and use it to apply ink to paper without thinking about how it looks, even if it’s only to worry over the qualities of the handwriting. We wonder what those who eventually attempt to read it will think. We know they will consciously or unconsciously judge us by this attempt to communicate. Some will pack the page struggling to get in all the information they can and some will inscribe defensive runes, such as happy faces or hearts, to protect them from judgment. Some even take defiant pride in the illegibility of their scrawl. The keyboard destroyed much of this part of our language by forcing an input standard on us that limits our choices to those that can be expressed by the press of a key. The product is uniform and although this has been a boon for the cause of communication, perhaps something was lost that we are only now attempting to reclaim. Email and now especially texting have sparked the creative abuse of language that causes purists to squirm. I suppose I must follow proper paragraph form and give supporting examples, but I know that you probably already know some of them. “lol” for laugh out loud, “brb” for be right back, or “:)” for a smiley face, are ligatures or perhaps compound glyphs that are shared nowadays by cultures throughout the world. There are online dictionaries filled with other glyphs like them. Like all glyphs, they depend on shared knowledge for mutual comprehension. It is the artistic nature of writing that makes it difficult to force through a keyboard. We are limited by the number of our fingers and the reach of our arms to a finite number of choices. Remember the complexity of Arabic? Not just its cursive nature, but the compound symbols as well. These must be expressed in terms of keystrokes, the pressing of a single key. The keyboard maps keystrokes to code values, just as those code values are mapped to code points. Every glyph that appears on the page must in some way be mapped to a set of keystrokes. QWERTY The entire planet uses more or less the same keyboard, differences being limited to the positioning of the numeric keypad and a few control keys. We can thank cheap PC’s for this. They spread so quickly that all other standards were swept away. It’s the mapping that’s important here. How do we use the limited set of keys we have available to express the hundreds of thousands of glyphs required by the languages of world? How did and will the cultures Figure 1: The Sholes and Glidden of the world force their written languages into a handful of keys typewriter. spanning the width of a pair of hands? The keyboard we use today was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, with assistance from Samuel W. Soule and Carlos S. Glidden, in 1873. It was the first commercially successful typewriter, later being bought and produced by the arms manufacturers E. Remington and Sons. It featured the standard four row “QWERTY” layout that we know today, although at first it only had upper case letters. Its initial reception was stumbling and barely profitable. Typed documents were considered harsh on the eyes and typed letters impolite. But it was useful where precise communication was required, and so the typewriter gradually worked its way into offices and then finally homes as workers brought the skill back from their jobs. The QWERTY layout, and others like it that we use today, was dictated by the proximity of the type hammers to each other. When two hammers in close proximity are pressed one after the other they tended to collide and jam. Sholes did extensive statistical analysis on character order within words and sentences and ordered the keyboard to avoid this. The typewriter was an American invention, but it was quickly taken up by the rest of the western world. German Olympia and Swiss Hermes typewriters were much treasured and sought after. Although they standardized on the QWERTY form of keyboard, they were instead QWERTZ (German), AZERTY (French), or ЙЦУКЕН (Russian), each following the same statistical design principles. Sholes’ methodical approach to design used 0.75 inch or 19mm spacing as opposed to the 0.9 inch or 23.5mm spacing used in piano keyboards. His design has proved to be so successful that we still use it today on standard “full-sized” keyboards. There are of course other sizes of keyboards, mostly Figure 2: Jammed typewriter smaller. Many laptop computers use smaller keyboards due to the limitations hammers. of the size of the device and many phones use “thumb-boards”, tiny keyboards for text entry. He placed keys for commonly used character pairs on opposite sides of the keyboard in order to speed to up typing and ease work. This zigzag mapping principle has been used by language after language as they’ve mapped their keyboards. So there was a lot of keyboard precedent to work with when extended ASCII and then code pages helped Europe into the computer age. The familiar typewriter keyboard patterns were just copied onto the computer keyboard. The path from typewriter, to teletype, to PC is obvious. But at the dawn of the computer revolution many parts of the world were still wrestling with the feat of fitting their written languages into the typewriter. The situation for them had become critical because modern civilization, if they wanted to participate, was not waiting for them. Mechanics and Terms We must first understand the thing itself before we can understand the problems with making use of it. There are a number of important terms used in describing aspects of keyboard use. The act of pressing and releasing a key is called a “Keystroke”. Keys generally have more than one value, even with typewriters, accessible through a variety of “modifier keys”. In English keyboards they are Shift, Control, and Alt, but other language’s keyboards can have many more. In the QWERTY keyboard Shift, Control, and Alt are called “Shift” keys, which when held down during and through the following keystroke changes its value. For both typewriters and computers, the most common shift function is to change key values from lower case to upper case. Another type of modifier key is a “Dead” key. Dead keys, when pressed and then released, alter the next keystroke. Shift-lock is a dead key. A third type of modifier is a “Compose” key. Compose keys are an extended type of dead key that allows the entry of a series of keystrokes that will eventually be combined into a single code value. Compose Key Sequence Composition Value ‘a á oc © ae œ Although most of the world uses the standard QUERTY physical layout keyboard, there are often different shift keys to allow for the character mappings required by the language. The only differences between different nationality’s keyboards are the symbols embedded in the tops of the keys. The keyboards underneath do not have character values encoded within them. Instead they transmit a scan code for each keystroke. The scan codes are translated by the operating system into the correct value. This is why keyboards can switch language mappings on demand despite what they have written on the tops of the keys, a feature offered by most modern operating systems. There are two other terms commonly used in references to keyboards, key press and key release. Key press is the act of pressing down a key, followed by a key release. Each of these acts produces a separate scan code and can thus be tied to a different code value. They are often used in conjunction with mouse events, such as selecting groups of objects on the screen. All of these opportunities to generate different scan codes and scan code combinations are used by different cultures to squeeze the most out of their keyboards. Standards There isn’t a single standard for keyboards, rather there are many. But there are two dominant physical keyboard standards that are commonly in use throughout the globe, ISO1 and ANSI2. ISO stands for the International Organization for Standardization, based in Geneva Switzerland, founded in 1947. It a private company that sets worldwide standards, negotiates treaties, and advises governments in setting 1 The International Organization for Standards. http://www.iso.org/ 2 The American National Standards Institute. http://www.ansi.org/ local standards. ANSI stands for the American National Standards Institute, another private standards organization based in the United States. ASCII is an example of an ANSI standard. The difference between these keyboard standards may seem small when they are compared, but to touch typists those differences are very important. First, ISO standard compliant keyboards reduced the size of the left shift key to make room for an extra key. Internationally, in most keyboards it’s used for greater than and less than. Another important difference is that ISO puts the tilde “~” on the right, next to the enter key. ANSI compliant keyboards have the tilde in the upper left corner, a feature that is very favored UNIX users who use Figure 3: ISO (left) and ANSI keyboards the key quite a bit. You might think that that extra key next to the shift on the ISO keyboard would make a very handy additional shift key and that’s probably what ISO was thinking when they designed the layout, especially in cultures with large character sets to support.

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