THIS vs. that

Posted on October 26, 2007
Filed Under Hardware |

Here’s a short pick ‘o the nit for your Friday evening perusal. It is a brief question, and the answer entails some trivia related to typewriter and computer peripheral history which is obscure, and not worthy of serious research, so I’ll just share this wondering aloud here for a small packet of those proverbial shits and giggles.

I’ll credit my daughter for steering my observation and subsequent brief thought on the current state of modern computer keyboards. The typical keyboard uses an arrangement of keys which resembles the following example:

macbookprokeyboard1 THIS vs. that

Now I am not wondering about the old familiar QWERTY layout, the pitch, slant, or spacing of keys. Nope. I have a much simpler query:

Why don’t keyboards have lowercase letters instead?

The only reason I wonder this, is because the majority of keyboards I’ve seen use uppercase letters on the key caps, but when one takes an unfair dig, belittles, degrades, or otherwise depresses a key (ha-ha) on such a keyboard, the resulting letter is in fact, a lowercase letter. One must activate a secondary key (typically SHIFT or CAPS LOCK) to even get the letter which is shown on the keycap.

This is only a slight usability issue that is accepted with nary a shrug from the typical computer user, but clearly is also an equally minor case of false advertising on behalf of the key caps. You simply cannot get the letter ‘A’ by pressing only the ‘A’ key on your keyboard — try it yourself, and see.

So, this question- which I care not to delve much further into, begs a host of other questions around the visibility of uppercase over lowercase (why is the mode we’re all strongly discouraged from using in the name of proper netiquette the one featured on most keyboards?) or the history behind keyboards (early computers only dealt with uppercase letters), but alas, I just want someone to read this, and expend the effort do compile an exhaustive analysis on why this condition is present even today.

Hey, free computer science term paper fodder for someone! ;-)

Happy Friday, y’all!

Comments

One Response to “THIS vs. that”

  1. brian on August 4th, 2008 11:36 am

    Yeah, it’s good trivia from an ancient post.

    Probably the most accurate guess though, is that computer keyboards are simply holdovers from the typewriter days.

    The first computers could not even display lower case letters, and so…

    Apple Computer was actually one of the first computer makers to offer a system that could even display both upper and lower case letters. Early experimenters using Apple computers, and wanting such behavior brewed up a shift-key mod to facilitate this, and Apple officially devised a hardware version of this mod in the design of the IIe.

    Of course the crux of the post has little to do with why the capitals are there on the keyboard the first place- it is more about computer keyboards not being WYSIWYG.

    For the pedantic keyboard user, who desires such “truth in advertising” from their keyboard, there are at least compromises.

Leave a Reply