Keyboard Mastery

We consider how pushing buttons with linguistic meaning joins man to machine and gives thought wings.

The fingers and the tongue are driven by adjacent areas of the brain. That's why the tongue moves with delicate hand work and fingers wiggle with emphatic speech. It is also why touch-typing is worth knowing.

The Underwood mechanism could put words on paper faster than other typewriters of the era. News on deadline was written by this brand because it worked.

Within the speech act, the sibilance, the s-sound, is made by pushing the tongue against the teeth or the left hand's third finger against the key. Either way, the motion is subconscious with mastery.

The deaf speak with fingers. The telegrapher taps patterns on one key. Thought in language seeks a path from brain to brain. With mastery comes influence. Survival value.

# Learning

I learned to type on a keyboard with blank keys. Home row was easy to remember, all letters came quickly, numbers slowly, and obscure punctuation, never. I had to spot the $ on a neighbor's keyboard, count the keys left or right, find the same. I miss. Damn.

I learned to program on a teletype. Computer language appeared on a roll of yellow paper, first as input, later as output. I could type faster than I could code so I typed other student's programs too. I thought about their statements as I typed, corrected small mistakes, and learned from everyone as I did.

I found ways to speed computer interaction by tweaking the code in the small computer that feed the big busy computer. I taught the small computer to add. It wasn't suppose to do that. My university offered me a job.

I wrote a program that taught morse code. It worked like the blank-key typewriter in a way, except guesses were free. I already knew morse code so I taught myself to touch-type on a keyboard upside down.

# Using

Skilled typists could once find employment in the typing pool. Speed and accuracy mattered. Thinking didn't. Keypunch operators would be paid to punch cards that were already punched. The machine verified that the exact same keys were pressed.

Navy signal men would type coded radio messages heard from both friend and foe, often just number, hour after hour. In time they found they could read a magazine while they worked with no loss of accuracy. We might wonder, what part of the brain did each task without interference?

The UUNET connects college kids to one giant message switch. With young brains still engaged they type to each other endlessly. They hunt and peck, having taken calculus instead of typing. A new vocabulary of abbreviation emerges. IMHO, WTF?

Wiki initially shuns the jargon words. Authors turned editors expand or remove them. Page names take on special meanings though and become wiki's own jargon thankfully with definitions a click away. Wikipedia turns process definition pages back to codes.

The Selectric had the best keyboard feel for a master. But mastery was not associated with creative work. The teletype was slow in an interesting way. You would press on a key and wait for the mechanism to let it fall. Ten characters per second max. APL envisioned a functional language made of new math symbols, typed on a customized Selectric.

Touch screens are terrible for typing in all conventional ways. Too small, no feel, different on every device and application. But spelling correction and predictive algorithms make this tolerable. Minds meet minds and make of the connections what they will.

# Related

The original version of Morse code program was written in 1976 for the Motorola 6800 microprocessor. This was in the early era of personal computers, then a hobby item.

The shift key modifies the meaning of keyboard keys. Where this is other than upper casing, both meanings are printed on the keycap. This project used rear projection to extend the shift concept to the huge Kanji alphabet.

The Amazon Echo is an always-on voice interface to the data center you don't understand. It sits in your living room answering questions and doing small chores while you try over and over to learn what it can do.

Ergonomic keyboards alter the conventional hand position and sometimes the layout of the keys in order to make typing more comfortable. For people who suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, this can mean the difference between working and not.

The PROCSY command interpreter offered simple logic but stopped short of any arithmetic. I found a way to hold a memory address in parameters and to increment it in the course of backward jumps.

In linguistics, the conduit metaphor is a dominant class of figurative expressions used when discussing communication itself. It operates whenever people speak or write as if they "insert" their mental contents into "containers" whose contents are then "extracted" by listeners and readers.