I've always been interested in vintage/antique tech, which is part of the attraction I have for typewriters. I have messed with antique Victor and Edison phonographs, vintage cameras, radios, and some other stuff. I also have a small collection of early DOS based PC computers, including an IBM 5150 (the first "PC" model), an IBM 5155 "Portable PC", and an AT&T 6300. I find it fascinating that we are still using a keyboard based on the ones used in typewriters from the 19th century. Crazy!

I miss these:

I still have one of those label machines, and use it often.
I also collect old mechanical calculators.  I was very surprised to learn that a speedy and efficient electro-mecanical calculator that could + - x and / was available as early as 1928 -  I have one, and it's still going strong! It can sound like something out of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory when in full flight, but it works, and I used it to do my tax last year.  At the time, it cost the equivalent of rather a nice car.
Here's another favourite of mine.  Hand-driven and small for its time; this was the salesman's travelling version; the pocket calcilator of 1930.

I have a few British telephones from the 1960s and 1970s too.  Recently read an industrial engineer's review of this British 700 series 'phone in which he mentioned that it looked to him as though it was made without regard to cost, and was infinitely superior to anything he had seen made in the last thirty years.  Interesting.

Last edited by beak (02-7-2015 04:30:08)

Retro-Z wrote:

M. Höhne wrote:

What part of continuing to use an established standard do you feel is crazy? QWERTY works pretty well and the few manufacturers that tried to sell a different pattern gave it up, as people wouldn't make the effort to change. Even now, when computer keyboards are so very easy to reconfigure, very few people bother to do it. Nothing else has been clearly demonstrated to be significantly better and in fact the very best computer keyboards are acknowledged to be the IBM designs from 30 years ago.

I sure do understand your fascination with old tech, though! Including a preference for kitchen appliances from the '40s and '50s and a dial phone. They just work better and feel better as well as lasting longer and being more interesting tech. Rave on!

LOL. It's not that I feel QWERTY isn't a practical keyboard setup, I'm just surprised that over the course of 130 years we didn't come up with something different, despite several different keyboard configurations that were introduced. Who would've thought that the first typewriter keyboard would so permanently affect the way a keyboard is set up?

Think about it. Whenever someone inputs something into the most modern, 3+GHz quad-core processor based computer with a 1TB+ hard drive, they are typing that in on a basic keyboard layout created in the late 1870s. You gotta admit that is fascinating/interesting.

 
When I did the museum activity with my son's class, I printed up a little binder with typewriter related pictures.  One of them was an iPhone keyboard layout compared to an early typewriter.  Then I had a caption explaining why the early typewriter keyboard was layed out that way.  Most of the kids managed to jam the keys of the mechanical while typing and they commented on the picture and caption.  They thought it was really cool that the keyboard layout, designed to minimize key jamming on a mechanical machine, still persists to this day in our electronic devices.