“Do you care for industrial design or tech history?” writes Marcin Wichary. “The keyboard is a beautiful object, both designed and not designed at all, that happened to change a lot and also not change in any way. (You could sit down the inventor of QWERTY at your 2023 mechanical keyboard and he would know what to do. Isn’t that amazing and/or disappointing?)”
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With a background in UX design, it’s no surprise that design manager Wichary has a thing for the main input device he uses in his work. “Keyboards fascinated me for years,” he writes. “But it occurred to me that a good, comprehensive, and human story of keyboards – starting with typewriters and ending with modern computers and phones – has never been written. How did we get from then to now? What were the steps along the way? And how on earth does QWERTY still look the same now as it did 150 years ago?”
“I wanted a book like this for years. So I wrote it.”
Wichary put together over 1,300 photos of keyboards over time (along with “260,000 carefully written and researched words” explaining them) to create Shift Happens, his two-volume book series that covers the history of keyboards from the earliest models to the latest. To get the 1,216-page book into print at the quality level he demanded, Wichary needed funds, so he posted the project on Kickstarter. Those willing to pony up $150 would receive the two books.
Staggeringly, at press time Wichary had over $630,000 in pledges, with a week left to pledge. Apparently he was right—there is no comprehensive, go-to visual and descriptive history of the keyboard—and a lot of people out there are interested in the unsung interface that many of us use as our main form of communication.
Here’s Wichary’s pitch vid:
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Source: core77