But when keyboards were first invented they were only used by specialists, not everyone. They were used only by secretaries and typists. Then later they were used on computers but still only by specialists. It wasn't until word processors and computers became widespread that keyboards became something used by almost everyone.
@@Attoparsec He's just pointing out your argument that keyboards being a bad way to enter stuff doesn't hold up on the merit of them having to be used by everyone.
While that is true that not everyone used a keyboard, they were not hard to learn. It was the application that made them specialised not the actual use of them. Even typing one fingered you could use them after a short tutorial, but most people back then had no reason to as they were expensive and perhaps, to an extent unreliable. It is in some way relatable to being able to drive a vehicle, not that hard to learn but in it's infancy not something that had much point, like most technology that is emerging.
@@AureliusR he never alleged that it was a bad way to enter stuff, just that people might be significantly more averse to learning how to use them were it not for the fact that they gradually entered society and slowly were accepted as commonplace. it's not inherently bad, but it is a surprisingly complicated device that the average current-day human is expected to know how to use.
"I figured this board could use a bit of context for future archaeologists" was funny, but actually a great touch. Its actually fascinating to hear about notes being left behind. I had a guitar where the original owner left his hand drawn wiring diagram for his particular pickup setup, just sitting inside the hardware cavity. I would watch a whole channel talking about stuff like that but its probably hella niche.
Typesetting was still thought until the 80s (apparently 90s in East Germany) so there are still people around with that particular muscle memory- would be fun to see an actual typesetter using this keyboard!
I was just thinking this! I learned letterpress in college (art school) and you can get pretty quick at it with some practice, it's muscle memory just like typing.
Manual letterpress printing was one of my (many) hobbies as a kid. - Yeah, I’m both that old *and* that weird 🙁 You’re probably well past this stage, but the mnemonic for the first lower-case row of letters is “Be Careful Driving Elephants Into Small Ford Garages”. The second row is “Let Me Now Help Out Your Punctuation With (commas)” Unfortunately, I no longer remember the phrase for the bottom row at this distant remove :-/ I’m not sure you mentioned it, but the arrangement of the lower-case letters was designed to minimize total hand-travel while composing. I guess that’d also minimize finger mileage in hunt & peck typing as well 😄 *Awesome* project, BTW! Now you just need to make an electromechanical connection between this and the pocket typewriter 😆 (Seriously though, don’t consider doing that, I wouldn’t want to be responsible)
@@necrotelecomnicon Ah! That’d do it! 👍 I think the one from my high school graphics shop was something different (something about Volvos, maybe?) but villains usually take a ride is great and easy to remember :-) Wow, you still have a letterpress shop? That’s pretty cool! Where are you and what kind of work do you do? Do you have a website? There’s no way I’d have time for it, even if I still had my old Kelsey hand-operated press, but it’s super-nostalgic to remember it. I really loved everything about the process: hand-setting the type and locking it up into the form, inking the press and setting the paper guides, the rhythm of insert-sheet/make the impression/remove the sheet, etc. The smell of kerosene still reminds me of cleaning the press and rollers :-) (Hmm, well - I loved *almost* every part of the process. Not “decomposing” the type. I hated that part 😉)
That's a pretty wild keyboard layout haha. Worst I've used was the layout on an elektronika mk-90 which has a grid of keys and the letters in the order of the russian alphabet, then the latin characters are mapped by the phonetic equivalent to where they map to the russian alphabet, so it's super wacky to type on.
This is the first video I have seen of yours. Your content is right up my ally. Keep it up! I love seeing people with a desire for novelty items figure out how to make them!
This is fascinating; I love a good historically inspired keyboard themed shitpost! Good luck on dvorak as well - I switched right under 3 years ago. It took me about 3 months to get back to 80wpm, which is what I was averaging at the time with qwerty. In my experience it's absolutely worth the switch from qwerty and I even prefer it over modern counterparts like colemak. My friend has an ortholinear keyboard and he's told me that dvorak even more comfortable without the staggered layout.
as someone who *is* a hardcore mechanical keyboard guy (that's how i got this video in my recommended, lol), i absolutely adore this project! such a cool concept even tho it's sort of a joke. i've built a lot of keyboards and this is definitely the prettiest pcb i've ever seen :O
I love when someone has a silly idea and then actually pulls through and builds it! Also, although having been a gamer all my life, and seeing "anti-ghosting" in the marketing of any reputable gaming keyboard, i finally know where ghosting comes from!
i know basically nothing about electronics but i am a big orthography and word nerd so this was a lot of fun to watch despite the bits that went over my head. I love that you kept some of the ligatures in! So cool to see the frequency of letters/glyphs represented visually on a keyboard
"One of those annoying things that probably would have been faster to automate, but maybe not, so you keep doing it, until you start to question yourself. But then sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and you just keep doing it." This made me laugh, but there were sad tears welling behind my eyes.
Damn cute project! Having worked for a bunch of year for a printing & typography museum, I have a thing for typesetting, both manual and hot metal (mostly Monotype). I love this keyboard and all the work that went into it. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
Very cool video! My father-in-law ran a mom and pop print shop for most of his career. He had a manual type press and a ton of letter plates. We have one of the plate drawers like what’s shown here. My partner wants to turn it into a photo collage or something. Also, as a nerd who has been typing dvorak for 10+ years, I’d love to see your thoughts after learning it, but give it 30 days; after a week I think I was up to 30ish wpm. It took a couple weeks to reach my usual 80 wpm.
For the ligatures, wouldn't it make sense to just send the individual characters, eg if you press the "fi" key then send "f" and "i" then it would work in any software, and the software would deal with the ligature in the same way if would deal with it when entered on a regular keyboard.
Bah! What's the point of including ligatures on your keyboard if you're not going to send them to the software _as ligatures._ ff and fi for the win! If they don't display properly, then that's the software's fault for not supporting unicode. (Or the font's just for not having those glyphs.)
Great vid, really unique and cool that you did most of the stuff yourself. I usually fix old keyboards or build modern kits but you building and designing one from scratch is really impressive. Would definitely enjoy more keyboard content from you mate.
As an ergonomic custom keyboard enthusiast (qmk dactyl manuform mini) the thumbnail really intrigued me, mostly by how unergonomic it looked 😁 Great project. I really like how the keycap puttying turned out.
The remains of my father’s letterpress printery holds down the floor of my garage. The US Navy taught me to touch type & copy Morse code. I’ve set type out of 2/3 cases, California Job cases, Franklin cases & Yankee cases & cast type off an Intertype model C keyboard. Looking at your “standard keyboard” technique makes me wonder if you learned to type on a line caster like my father did. . . . That said, it would be interesting to see how I would manage your 2/3 case keyboard. Neat little project.
What a wonderful piece, I been fascinated by movable type and even have a small collection of letters in different fonts made of wood, I been wanting to do something interesting with them, making a full keyboard is not quite useful as demonstrated, but a small macro pad would be ideal. So thanks for the inspiration!
@@Attoparsec if you ever feel like making another keyboard design, look into the Fitaly.. A layout optimized for one-hand typing on palm sized mobile devices
Love that you included lines like 'your results may vary' as if anyone watching was seriously contemplating making this weirdo board hahaha. Seriously though- this is such a fun idea, i had never considered keyboards in this way before! Gloriously silly and expertly executed, as the best project videos are.
I'm sure if you chop it into 4 pieces and add some layers, someone will say that it's their perfect keyboard for their freak living situation inside M. C. Escher's "Relativity".
Also remember that you have decades of muscle memory on the QWERTY keyboard… so to do the test properly you need the same decades of use… or find two that have never typed and give one the QWERTY and the other yours… I guess a old typesetter would probably do fine … if you can resurrect one 😊
The worst keyboard for general purpose use is the custom ones that they use to type addresses from envelopes into post office software when the automated letter recognition software can't cope. It's very, very optimised for its narrow use case so to use it for writing general text is complicated as all heck, especially as what we consider function keys are the default option when you press down on most keys, and creating a standalone glyph needs to be escaped.
At 2:00 "miniscule" is actually spelled "minuscule". Interestingly the word "minuscule" and "miniature" have completely different roots, "minuscule" comes from "minus" whlle "miniature" comes from the latin "minium" meaning red, from the small red illustrations in old manuscripts.
The BMI is one of my favorite things to do in town, I go at least once a year. I'm also a member of the B&O Railroad Museum. If you liked the BMI be sure to give that a try someday too!
Nah, a true "worst" keyboard would probably need a secondary set of keys on the bottom of the keyboard - so you can type your passwords without others seeing them. 😄
After a medical event made my right hand pretty much decoration, I switched my keyboard to Left Hand Dvorak, and rearranged the keycaps to match. It was initially rough going (ca. 50% error rate) but now is about the same speed as QWERTY but with quite a bit less hand movement. As a bonus, _nobody_ borrows my computer more than once.
I just found this. I built one of these from the California Job case around 2001. I’ve been meaning to clean up the wiring, but if it’s been over 20 years, it probably won’t happen.
The type would have been grey metal with black glyphs (from the ink) so I would have used black for the infill. In fact, since you printed the keys, making each one look like a little pile of type would have been very cool (albeit maybe not very comfortable for extended typing…) All-in-all, an interesting project and excellent final result!
I think we could make it even worse, replace the buttons with little displays (like the thing from elgato) to show the letter. And now we switch the letters around when they are in the peripheral vision, so we dont aktiveley see the switcharoo and have to search for every letter and cant even be sure it isnt where we just looked. I saw this once with text where they switched the words, was pretty intresting
I was wondering how you did the infill. What specific epoxy did you use? I've done infill with an injector and nail polish, it works pretty well too, but is stinkier.
It reminds me a little bit about these strange keyboards I sometimes see at supermarket checkout counters. They also have several big keys. Or maybe for a music software?
@@TheWipal something like this: i.redd.it/bz8axsjozkt91.jpg Or this hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/cash-register-main.png (ok that's German) Or maybe a Russian(? - I am not totally sure) edition: posua.com/556-thickbox_default/lpos-084.jpg
Howdy, please make sure to vent fumes from SLA properly. It is very bad for your health. We bought one and immediately did a fumes extraction hood for it and still it stinks so badly.
This reminds me of a video I watched on here of someone using machine learning to optimize which keys are which by using letter frequency and minimizing distance of finger travel.
For a dumb idea, that's a lot of polish on the final product. Inside out, very clean. Even though it's not particularly useful, I'm sure this will be an excellent conversation piece to keep on display.
I'm left-handed, and decided several years ago to swap to a left-handed mouse. Around the same time I decided I might as well swap to dvorak for left handers, so I'm on DVL. I get about 5 more wpm on it than I did on qwerty, but I have to spend way more time adjusting keybindings from WASD and ZXC to OEAZ and XGV or I,0 . Like, a lot more time.
Thank you for spending the time and money to do something interesting with keyboards. I liked your solution for the ligature keys. The only technically acceptable alternative is to create a Microsoft keyboard layout with custom graphics keys which can include unicode characters... But... The ms keyboard layout generator is based off standard key positions and you would have to translate the whole board to "normal" to figure out what buttons were available.
In hind sight you could have or probably still can use auto hot key and and lua macros. a good video to reference is The Art of the Bodge: How I Made The Emoji Keyboard, by Tom Scott for setting up and programming the keyboard in the microcontroller.
It took me 3 months, full-time to learn Dvorak having been a QWERTY typist. I was 22, and had been using computers since I was three. Within those 3 months, I managed to get to my original QWERTY speed and now I exceed it significantly because I learned to touch-type properly. It's now been 14 years! I can still touch-type QWERTY but there is a mental 'cross-over' that I have to do and it is slightly reduced in speed. I imagine that if you give yourself six months you could do the same thing with the two-thirds. It's pointless - but at least it would be fun if you ever had to take the keyboard to somebody else....!
3:10 There is one problem with this. Should multiple keys be pressed, there are multiple 3+ key combinations that result in the same detection. For any 4 keys that between them share 4 IO ports, it is impossible if 3 or 4 of them are pressed. And if 3, which 3. Or even if it is diagonal-pair, which diagonal. In the presented picture, AE, BD, ABD, ABE, ADE, BDE and ABDE all produce the same result: ports 1,2,4,5 triggering. 3:50 Oh.
although i know nothing about building keyboards, this was pretty fun and interesting. its cool to see someone actual BUILD a funky keyboard instead of watching someone review one you know
As someone who made the switch to Dvorak years ago I can't recommend it enough. I absolutely love it. It is also rather easy to go back and forth between Qwerty and Dvorak as the need arises.
I learned to type on a Dvorak keyboard, I was never able to learn qwerty, it just didn't make any sense to me. As for Dvorak breaking keyboard shortcuts, just set up the language switching shortcut in Windows, and switch keyboard layouts before you start the game. Most games nowadays will modify themselves to accept the proper inputs from the proper keys in the proper position, so if by default the action button is E, it will say press . so it's not really an issue unless you look at the keyboard a lot for shortcuts. I usually just hit the keyboard switching shortcut I have set up on my K95.
When I was first learning to type, I tried to learn on a qwerty keyboard like pretty much everyone else in the United States, but no matter how hard I tried I never could get past about 15 or 20 words per minute. Then I saw this little thing called Dvorak in the options, and within a month I was typing 50 words a minute. I still use Dvorak and regularly break 120 words per minute, though my average is between 95 and 100.
Alternate keyboard layouts are the best, I use a slightly modified colemak on my split vertically staggered split keyboard and it's a joy to type on. Clacky clack clack clack clack
@@minerscale I have never looked into any alternate keyboard layouts since I learned to type. I figured there wasn't really any need to at the time, since back then I was typing around 75 or 80 words a minute which was faster than any qwerty keyboard typer that I personally knew. I'll have to look into Colemak. I have heard the name before, but past that I don't know anything about it.
@@shattered_helix Colemak is better than dvorak by most metrics you can measure it by and has a couple other perks like leaving z, x, c and v, and a in the same spot to make default shortcuts still very doable. A brilliant middleground between perfection and practicality. I recommend the dh variant though.
@@minerscale I'll give it a look, though I doubt I will switch having been typing on a Dvorak keyboard for 30 years. It's just kind of ingrained in me and for my purposes, I think a hundred words a minute is probably fast enough. But who knows? I may end up liking it better.
@@shattered_helix Yeah fair enough, qwerty -> dvorak is a big difference, dvorak -> colemak is better, but not that big of a change I believe. If you don't care about any kind of shortcut backwards compatibility and you want something that is perfect by the metrics humans tend to care about when typing HALmak is ridiculous and for you lmao.
hey youtube is recommending this video about an awful keyboard, it's probably gonna be a video about this ancient keyboard someone found plus a brief explanation about how early keyboard designers were throwing stuff at the wall to see what worked. Oh, he's actually building this monstrosity.
if you ever try something like this again, you should try getting more colors of resin and print the letters out push them in place, might need to make a tolerance for it though, but you could probably get away without it
A wonderfully nerdy endeavour! And if you would fancy doing more stuff 86 times, why not cast the key tops in lead, with raised, mirrored letters on them? That would give both historical relevance and a great tactile experience.
I'd be curious to see, just as a concept, the two-thirds scaled down by half, so that all the 2x2 keys are standard 1u keys. Though this would only really work with all of the half keys having domed tops, if not a parabolic curved top, so that the keys themselves can be differentiated by the finger tip. Or, say, make the base unit 0.75u, rather than 0.5u so that there's still some actual width to the keys. The only design consideration here would be going with a membrane switch or making your own scissor switches from stamped steel (similar to the Cherry MX Ultra Low Profile switch), as full-sized mechanical switches don't exist within this size and any mecha switch that does exist in this size, tact switches and mouse switches, won't have the same weighting or throw characteristics; though within the controller world, there are mechamembrane that replaces the carbon pad contact with a mouse switch, which does return some amount of throw and modifies the springiness of the key. From personal experience with typing on a variety of designs, I have noticed that I don't always hit keys in the center, a lot of keys I'll edge or corner type depending on the design of the keyboard, thus I think mini keys have _potential_ of working in an odd layout like this, but only if they have a modified shape to enhance usability.
perhaps these keyboards (given the design mirroring how common certain letters are) would be ideal for producing en masse and given to a perfectly ethical monkey farm for a study on the viability of the infinite typewriter experiment?
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
“it has a lot of character” yeah every keyboard has a lot of characters, that’s the entire point
This one especially, having at least 28 more letter keys.
that got a solid, audible giggle out of me
Nice!
'The bird flu'? Uh, yeah, they...tend to do that.
r/facepalm
As a fellow nerd, it's important to keep the outside world from knowing just how free time you really have.
As a fellow nerd, let them know
put the word 'much' between 'how' and 'free'.
@@alex.g7317 crazy part about that is that I skimmed past that mistake and read "much" in my head, even though the word wasn't there
@@markolesh2003 its like frikin magic!
Don’t worry; they already know.
But when keyboards were first invented they were only used by specialists, not everyone. They were used only by secretaries and typists. Then later they were used on computers but still only by specialists. It wasn't until word processors and computers became widespread that keyboards became something used by almost everyone.
Well, yes, that's what makes it a thought experiment. What if they were invented, ex nihilo, today?
@@Attoparsec He's just pointing out your argument that keyboards being a bad way to enter stuff doesn't hold up on the merit of them having to be used by everyone.
Many folks that wrote a lot took to 'composing' with a typewriter.
While that is true that not everyone used a keyboard, they were not hard to learn. It was the application that made them specialised not the actual use of them. Even typing one fingered you could use them after a short tutorial, but most people back then had no reason to as they were expensive and perhaps, to an extent unreliable. It is in some way relatable to being able to drive a vehicle, not that hard to learn but in it's infancy not something that had much point, like most technology that is emerging.
@@AureliusR he never alleged that it was a bad way to enter stuff, just that people might be significantly more averse to learning how to use them were it not for the fact that they gradually entered society and slowly were accepted as commonplace. it's not inherently bad, but it is a surprisingly complicated device that the average current-day human is expected to know how to use.
"I figured this board could use a bit of context for future archaeologists" was funny, but actually a great touch. Its actually fascinating to hear about notes being left behind. I had a guitar where the original owner left his hand drawn wiring diagram for his particular pickup setup, just sitting inside the hardware cavity. I would watch a whole channel talking about stuff like that but its probably hella niche.
Typesetting was still thought until the 80s (apparently 90s in East Germany) so there are still people around with that particular muscle memory- would be fun to see an actual typesetter using this keyboard!
Oh yes, that would be fabulous!
I was just thinking this! I learned letterpress in college (art school) and you can get pretty quick at it with some practice, it's muscle memory just like typing.
I set type out of a 2/3 case & the standard “California Job Case” regularly. It would be interesting to try typing on a keyboard with the 2/3 lay.
@@haramanggapuja
If the board goes into production you could have esports competitions!
@@haramanggapuja oh? That's awesome! Maybe you could give this keyboard a try?
Manual letterpress printing was one of my (many) hobbies as a kid. - Yeah, I’m both that old *and* that weird 🙁
You’re probably well past this stage, but the mnemonic for the first lower-case row of letters is “Be Careful Driving Elephants Into Small Ford Garages”. The second row is “Let Me Now Help Out Your Punctuation With (commas)” Unfortunately, I no longer remember the phrase for the bottom row at this distant remove :-/
I’m not sure you mentioned it, but the arrangement of the lower-case letters was designed to minimize total hand-travel while composing. I guess that’d also minimize finger mileage in hunt & peck typing as well 😄
*Awesome* project, BTW! Now you just need to make an electromechanical connection between this and the pocket typewriter 😆 (Seriously though, don’t consider doing that, I wouldn’t want to be responsible)
He really needs too see this comment
In the poster in my letterpress shop, the third line says Villains Usually Take A Ride :-)
i found "VUTAR
Villains Usually Take A Ride
(or, Villains Usually Take three-ems And Run)"
@@necrotelecomnicon Ah! That’d do it! 👍 I think the one from my high school graphics shop was something different (something about Volvos, maybe?) but villains usually take a ride is great and easy to remember :-)
Wow, you still have a letterpress shop? That’s pretty cool! Where are you and what kind of work do you do? Do you have a website?
There’s no way I’d have time for it, even if I still had my old Kelsey hand-operated press, but it’s super-nostalgic to remember it. I really loved everything about the process: hand-setting the type and locking it up into the form, inking the press and setting the paper guides, the rhythm of insert-sheet/make the impression/remove the sheet, etc. The smell of kerosene still reminds me of cleaning the press and rollers :-)
(Hmm, well - I loved *almost* every part of the process. Not “decomposing” the type. I hated that part 😉)
@@astral_haze Ah! That’s excellent, and it includes the em slugs!
That's a pretty wild keyboard layout haha. Worst I've used was the layout on an elektronika mk-90 which has a grid of keys and the letters in the order of the russian alphabet, then the latin characters are mapped by the phonetic equivalent to where they map to the russian alphabet, so it's super wacky to type on.
Worst I've ever used is those digital keyboards that use alphabetical order instead of a qwerty. I'm just too used to it.
surprised by the amount of effort you put into it, this deserve more views for sure
This is the first video I have seen of yours. Your content is right up my ally. Keep it up! I love seeing people with a desire for novelty items figure out how to make them!
This was UNBELIEVABLY interesting to me.
Big chonky keys in strange places is something i didnt expect to see today, but its what i shouldve expected
This is fascinating; I love a good historically inspired keyboard themed shitpost!
Good luck on dvorak as well - I switched right under 3 years ago. It took me about 3 months to get back to 80wpm, which is what I was averaging at the time with qwerty. In my experience it's absolutely worth the switch from qwerty and I even prefer it over modern counterparts like colemak. My friend has an ortholinear keyboard and he's told me that dvorak even more comfortable without the staggered layout.
as someone who *is* a hardcore mechanical keyboard guy (that's how i got this video in my recommended, lol), i absolutely adore this project! such a cool concept even tho it's sort of a joke. i've built a lot of keyboards and this is definitely the prettiest pcb i've ever seen :O
I love when someone has a silly idea and then actually pulls through and builds it! Also, although having been a gamer all my life, and seeing "anti-ghosting" in the marketing of any reputable gaming keyboard, i finally know where ghosting comes from!
i know basically nothing about electronics but i am a big orthography and word nerd so this was a lot of fun to watch despite the bits that went over my head. I love that you kept some of the ligatures in! So cool to see the frequency of letters/glyphs represented visually on a keyboard
"One of those annoying things that probably would have been faster to automate, but maybe not, so you keep doing it, until you start to question yourself. But then sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and you just keep doing it."
This made me laugh, but there were sad tears welling behind my eyes.
Damn cute project! Having worked for a bunch of year for a printing & typography museum, I have a thing for typesetting, both manual and hot metal (mostly Monotype). I love this keyboard and all the work that went into it. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
Very cool video! My father-in-law ran a mom and pop print shop for most of his career. He had a manual type press and a ton of letter plates. We have one of the plate drawers like what’s shown here. My partner wants to turn it into a photo collage or something.
Also, as a nerd who has been typing dvorak for 10+ years, I’d love to see your thoughts after learning it, but give it 30 days; after a week I think I was up to 30ish wpm. It took a couple weeks to reach my usual 80 wpm.
THANK YOU FOR DOCUMENTING THE CUSTOM DOUBLE SHOT PROCESS.
NOW I CAN FINALLY FINISH ONE OF MY CUSTOM KEY CAP PROJECTS!
There are some ideas that are clearly useless, but they're so cool that they Must Be Done. This is one of them.
For the ligatures, wouldn't it make sense to just send the individual characters, eg if you press the "fi" key then send "f" and "i" then it would work in any software, and the software would deal with the ligature in the same way if would deal with it when entered on a regular keyboard.
Bah! What's the point of including ligatures on your keyboard if you're not going to send them to the software _as ligatures._
ff and fi for the win! If they don't display properly, then that's the software's fault for not supporting unicode. (Or the font's just for not having those glyphs.)
@@angeldude101 Well there could be a switch on the keyboard to choose the ligature key behavior.
Such an underrated channel. Awesome video!!
As someone who did classic typography in university and is currently making a custom keyboard with non-standard key cap requirements, I felt this.
Great vid, really unique and cool that you did most of the stuff yourself. I usually fix old keyboards or build modern kits but you building and designing one from scratch is really impressive.
Would definitely enjoy more keyboard content from you mate.
As an ergonomic custom keyboard enthusiast (qmk dactyl manuform mini) the thumbnail really intrigued me, mostly by how unergonomic it looked 😁 Great project. I really like how the keycap puttying turned out.
The remains of my father’s letterpress printery holds down the floor of my garage. The US Navy taught me to touch type & copy Morse code. I’ve set type out of 2/3 cases, California Job cases, Franklin cases & Yankee cases & cast type off an Intertype model C keyboard. Looking at your “standard keyboard” technique makes me wonder if you learned to type on a line caster like my father did.
. . . That said, it would be interesting to see how I would manage your 2/3 case keyboard. Neat little project.
I genuinely feel that Chyrosran22 needs to have a go at this keyboard.
What a wonderful piece, I been fascinated by movable type and even have a small collection of letters in different fonts made of wood, I been wanting to do something interesting with them, making a full keyboard is not quite useful as demonstrated, but a small macro pad would be ideal.
So thanks for the inspiration!
How the hell did I stumble into this video? Don' care. Loved it.
Almost 1700 subscribers. But awesome content. You rock 🪨
Love the determination to achieve a goal. Thank you for the ride!
Matthew you're an inspiration. Nice to see the Boeing Surplus antique stereo microscope put to use.
Thanks! And, yeah, I get a lot of use out of it. I just need to work on a camera mount for it, so I can include some shots from it in videos.
@@Attoparsec if you ever feel like making another keyboard design, look into the Fitaly.. A layout optimized for one-hand typing on palm sized mobile devices
Love that you included lines like 'your results may vary' as if anyone watching was seriously contemplating making this weirdo board hahaha. Seriously though- this is such a fun idea, i had never considered keyboards in this way before! Gloriously silly and expertly executed, as the best project videos are.
I'm sure if you chop it into 4 pieces and add some layers, someone will say that it's their perfect keyboard for their freak living situation inside M. C. Escher's "Relativity".
Also remember that you have decades of muscle memory on the QWERTY keyboard… so to do the test properly you need the same decades of use… or find two that have never typed and give one the QWERTY and the other yours… I guess a old typesetter would probably do fine … if you can resurrect one 😊
The worst keyboard for general purpose use is the custom ones that they use to type addresses from envelopes into post office software when the automated letter recognition software can't cope. It's very, very optimised for its narrow use case so to use it for writing general text is complicated as all heck, especially as what we consider function keys are the default option when you press down on most keys, and creating a standalone glyph needs to be escaped.
At 2:00 "miniscule" is actually spelled "minuscule". Interestingly the word "minuscule" and "miniature" have completely different roots, "minuscule" comes from "minus" whlle "miniature" comes from the latin "minium" meaning red, from the small red illustrations in old manuscripts.
I was lucky enough to see a Linotype still in operation at the Baltimore Museum of Industry; such amazing machines.
The BMI is one of my favorite things to do in town, I go at least once a year. I'm also a member of the B&O Railroad Museum. If you liked the BMI be sure to give that a try someday too!
randomly found this video. I have a lot of respect for you. cheers
Wow, 😮 it takes 2:43 that long to actually talk about the subject of the video. Sorry too much fluff for me.
Such a great video, I subscribed, keep up the good content
12:56 genius explanation of that sunken cost automation paradox situation
"Resin SLA printers..."
Thin ends of the wedge my friend. Gateway drug.
Nah, a true "worst" keyboard would probably need a secondary set of keys on the bottom of the keyboard - so you can type your passwords without others seeing them. 😄
Despite the fact that I definitely already knew how a keyboard matrix works, I didn't skip your explanation because I found it so engaging and elegant
"It cost too much, I'm not going to add it all up to find out", if you ignore the costs hard enough it won't hurt you 🤣
After a medical event made my right hand pretty much decoration, I switched my keyboard to Left Hand Dvorak, and rearranged the keycaps to match. It was initially rough going (ca. 50% error rate) but now is about the same speed as QWERTY but with quite a bit less hand movement. As a bonus, _nobody_ borrows my computer more than once.
I just found this. I built one of these from the California Job case around 2001. I’ve been meaning to clean up the wiring, but if it’s been over 20 years, it probably won’t happen.
The type would have been grey metal with black glyphs (from the ink) so I would have used black for the infill.
In fact, since you printed the keys, making each one look like a little pile of type would have been very cool (albeit maybe not very comfortable for extended typing…)
All-in-all, an interesting project and excellent final result!
A lot of letterpress enthusiasts would be happy to have one of these keyboards, just for learning the case layout.
metal keycaps with an extruded type to indicate what character it is would've been cool
The only thing that could make this keyboard worse is if it has cherry my switches.
I think we could make it even worse, replace the buttons with little displays (like the thing from elgato) to show the letter. And now we switch the letters around when they are in the peripheral vision, so we dont aktiveley see the switcharoo and have to search for every letter and cant even be sure it isnt where we just looked.
I saw this once with text where they switched the words, was pretty intresting
As a typography geek I truly love this! Will subscribe and share! ❤
I was wondering how you did the infill. What specific epoxy did you use?
I've done infill with an injector and nail polish, it works pretty well too, but is stinkier.
Oh right, I forgot to include a shot of it in the video: JB Weld PlasticWeld.
It reminds me a little bit about these strange keyboards I sometimes see at supermarket checkout counters. They also have several big keys. Or maybe for a music software?
u gotta take a picture dude
@@TheWipal something like this:
i.redd.it/bz8axsjozkt91.jpg
Or this
hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/cash-register-main.png (ok that's German)
Or maybe a Russian(? - I am not totally sure) edition:
posua.com/556-thickbox_default/lpos-084.jpg
@oida10000 JESUS, those keyboard designs look old old! 😯😯
Howdy, please make sure to vent fumes from SLA properly. It is very bad for your health. We bought one and immediately did a fumes extraction hood for it and still it stinks so badly.
This reminds me of a video I watched on here of someone using machine learning to optimize which keys are which by using letter frequency and minimizing distance of finger travel.
For a dumb idea, that's a lot of polish on the final product. Inside out, very clean. Even though it's not particularly useful, I'm sure this will be an excellent conversation piece to keep on display.
from inflammable liquids directly to keyboards ... what does this tell me?
I'm left-handed, and decided several years ago to swap to a left-handed mouse. Around the same time I decided I might as well swap to dvorak for left handers, so I'm on DVL. I get about 5 more wpm on it than I did on qwerty, but I have to spend way more time adjusting keybindings from WASD and ZXC to OEAZ and XGV or I,0 . Like, a lot more time.
Thank you for spending the time and money to do something interesting with keyboards.
I liked your solution for the ligature keys. The only technically acceptable alternative is to create a Microsoft keyboard layout with custom graphics keys which can include unicode characters... But... The ms keyboard layout generator is based off standard key positions and you would have to translate the whole board to "normal" to figure out what buttons were available.
Just imagine starting a job and that's the keyboard at your computer.
That is a cool keyboard! Something most people take for granted. I like how you broke it down and built it from scratch.
In hind sight you could have or probably still can use auto hot key and and lua macros. a good video to reference is The Art of the Bodge: How I Made The Emoji Keyboard, by Tom Scott for setting up and programming the keyboard in the microcontroller.
It took me 3 months, full-time to learn Dvorak having been a QWERTY typist. I was 22, and had been using computers since I was three. Within those 3 months, I managed to get to my original QWERTY speed and now I exceed it significantly because I learned to touch-type properly.
It's now been 14 years! I can still touch-type QWERTY but there is a mental 'cross-over' that I have to do and it is slightly reduced in speed.
I imagine that if you give yourself six months you could do the same thing with the two-thirds. It's pointless - but at least it would be fun if you ever had to take the keyboard to somebody else....!
Thank you, gods of RUclips algorithms for presenting me this channel.
Subbed and liked.
You using “masses” as a verb made me very pleased.
ahh, I've had the "tried to pull up the built-in LED" experience too. Love Teensy boards!
(8:15) Have you seen the enter key on an ISO keyboard?
I prefer ISO over ANSI
This is epic. As a font designer and a mechanical keyboard fan, I want to try this so badly!
happy to be in the first 1000 subs of your channel
3:10 There is one problem with this. Should multiple keys be pressed, there are multiple 3+ key combinations that result in the same detection.
For any 4 keys that between them share 4 IO ports, it is impossible if 3 or 4 of them are pressed. And if 3, which 3. Or even if it is diagonal-pair, which diagonal.
In the presented picture, AE, BD, ABD, ABE, ADE, BDE and ABDE all produce the same result: ports 1,2,4,5 triggering.
3:50 Oh.
“These are, in fact, the cases in question.”
I learned something today!
although i know nothing about building keyboards, this was pretty fun and interesting. its cool to see someone actual BUILD a funky keyboard instead of watching someone review one you know
As someone who made the switch to Dvorak years ago I can't recommend it enough. I absolutely love it. It is also rather easy to go back and forth between Qwerty and Dvorak as the need arises.
The big issue with dvorak is that at least when i used them +10 years ago was that they broke games and programs that use a lot of keyboard shortcuts
I learned to type on a Dvorak keyboard, I was never able to learn qwerty, it just didn't make any sense to me.
As for Dvorak breaking keyboard shortcuts, just set up the language switching shortcut in Windows, and switch keyboard layouts before you start the game. Most games nowadays will modify themselves to accept the proper inputs from the proper keys in the proper position, so if by default the action button is E, it will say press . so it's not really an issue unless you look at the keyboard a lot for shortcuts. I usually just hit the keyboard switching shortcut I have set up on my K95.
When I was first learning to type, I tried to learn on a qwerty keyboard like pretty much everyone else in the United States, but no matter how hard I tried I never could get past about 15 or 20 words per minute. Then I saw this little thing called Dvorak in the options, and within a month I was typing 50 words a minute. I still use Dvorak and regularly break 120 words per minute, though my average is between 95 and 100.
Alternate keyboard layouts are the best, I use a slightly modified colemak on my split vertically staggered split keyboard and it's a joy to type on. Clacky clack clack clack clack
@@minerscale I have never looked into any alternate keyboard layouts since I learned to type. I figured there wasn't really any need to at the time, since back then I was typing around 75 or 80 words a minute which was faster than any qwerty keyboard typer that I personally knew.
I'll have to look into Colemak. I have heard the name before, but past that I don't know anything about it.
@@shattered_helix Colemak is better than dvorak by most metrics you can measure it by and has a couple other perks like leaving z, x, c and v, and a in the same spot to make default shortcuts still very doable. A brilliant middleground between perfection and practicality. I recommend the dh variant though.
@@minerscale I'll give it a look, though I doubt I will switch having been typing on a Dvorak keyboard for 30 years. It's just kind of ingrained in me and for my purposes, I think a hundred words a minute is probably fast enough. But who knows? I may end up liking it better.
@@shattered_helix Yeah fair enough, qwerty -> dvorak is a big difference, dvorak -> colemak is better, but not that big of a change I believe.
If you don't care about any kind of shortcut backwards compatibility and you want something that is perfect by the metrics humans tend to care about when typing HALmak is ridiculous and for you lmao.
Great video, I enjoyed your enunciation and directness. Also glad there was no background music.
At least you have something unique to put on your resumé now. "Can type at 22wpm on the California 2/3 keyboard layout."
13:19 Courier ligatures. Every day we fall further from the grace of God 🤣
Only 2k subscribers? You deserve so much more fr
hey youtube is recommending this video about an awful keyboard, it's probably gonna be a video about this ancient keyboard someone found plus a brief explanation about how early keyboard designers were throwing stuff at the wall to see what worked. Oh, he's actually building this monstrosity.
Me:
Me:
Me: "I feel so dirty looking at this. The longer I look, the worse it gets."
This content is starting to get the recognition it deserves
I learned so much in this video, thanks! Subscribed.
This was posted 2 weeks about but it feels like its 6 years old
if you ever try something like this again, you should try getting more colors of resin and print the letters out push them in place, might need to make a tolerance for it though, but you could probably get away without it
15:35
You have no idea how much this information just explained for me
How do you only have 1,140 subs??? That was an awesome video
Atto should send this to Linus Tech Tips and their lab to get a qualitative statement of bad-ness.
really cool project, so i had to subscribe (:
Think how much faster you could write bash scripts with a dedicated fi key. Productivity!
That also works in zsh. And works way more polished then bash. Switch to it, and thank me later.
Awesome job captian, great invention. This "orthogonal" keyboard layout is very interesting,
A wonderfully nerdy endeavour! And if you would fancy doing more stuff 86 times, why not cast the key tops in lead, with raised, mirrored letters on them? That would give both historical relevance and a great tactile experience.
The worst keyboard ever designed was undoubtedly the ZX Spectrum Keyboard which literally had keys of squelchy mulch.
I'd be curious to see, just as a concept, the two-thirds scaled down by half, so that all the 2x2 keys are standard 1u keys. Though this would only really work with all of the half keys having domed tops, if not a parabolic curved top, so that the keys themselves can be differentiated by the finger tip. Or, say, make the base unit 0.75u, rather than 0.5u so that there's still some actual width to the keys. The only design consideration here would be going with a membrane switch or making your own scissor switches from stamped steel (similar to the Cherry MX Ultra Low Profile switch), as full-sized mechanical switches don't exist within this size and any mecha switch that does exist in this size, tact switches and mouse switches, won't have the same weighting or throw characteristics; though within the controller world, there are mechamembrane that replaces the carbon pad contact with a mouse switch, which does return some amount of throw and modifies the springiness of the key. From personal experience with typing on a variety of designs, I have noticed that I don't always hit keys in the center, a lot of keys I'll edge or corner type depending on the design of the keyboard, thus I think mini keys have _potential_ of working in an odd layout like this, but only if they have a modified shape to enhance usability.
perhaps these keyboards (given the design mirroring how common certain letters are) would be ideal for producing en masse and given to a perfectly ethical monkey farm for a study on the viability of the infinite typewriter experiment?
BTW… the original typewriter was a person trained to use a new mechanical device which is today the typewriter
no keyboard is worse, and nuke disguised as a keyboard that will blow up as soon as it gets within range of your house is even worse.
Great video and great idea. This was very fun to watch.
The hombre Penrose tiling PCB was magnificent!