Who Knew?

Keyboard lore. It's popular among typesetters, reporters, and now, computer programmers. Important information, such as:

Who invented the smiley? According to Scott Fahlman, he did. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/

Why is the keyboard laid out QWERTYUIOP? Says Wikipedia: "The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee. Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document. A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together."


What word can be found as an anagram in the top line of the keyboard? Typewriter.

There's even a book devoted to the subject: Quirky Qwerty: The Story of the Keyboard Your Fingertips (Hardcover) by Torbjorn Lundmark.

Now, check out CAPSoff.com, the website that explains to us: "The problem with Caps Lock (and it's not a huge problem, like war, disease, or poverty) is that whether we want it or not, it's forced on us, with every new computer, and it's so annoying that there is actually a whole sub-industry in software programs to remap the thing. This is about choice. We want computer vendors to provide CAPSfree keyboards as an option."

"The keyboard is not something we can live without. Everyone, these days, uses the keyboard more than they write. Any glitch is going to annoy people, and even if it's a low-level annoyance, eventually it becomes too much. Caps Lock is like a small pebble in your shoe. Of course you can keep walking. You can just try to ignore it. But eventually you really have to stop and take your show off. The world is not perfect but many people think it's worthwhile spending a little effort improving it."

So is there a better mousetrap? The folks at CAPSoff.com would like to think so, and here are a few of the efforts to make it so: http://capsoff.wikidot.com/competition:main

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