1.
I have a SafeType, thanks to a friend who noticed one about to be thrown away. This is among the most notable and interesting “ergonomic” keyboards, complete with mirrors that help you orient yourself when you’re starting out.

2.
The Comfort System keyboard is another “ergonomic“ device that is honestly pretty frightening to look at (explaining the challenge of making keyboards like these). You can reposition and reorient each of the three parts independently.

3.
I love these DataDesk Little Fingers keyboards with smaller keys because you can see exactly when iMac was introduced and how the company tried to “redesign” the keyboard to fit the new style.

4.
This is another Mac “alternate universe“ keyboard - an Adesso ergonomic keyboard that feels like “what if Apple Adjustable still existed when iMac came around”?

5.
This strange “medical” keyboard is more mechanical than you’d expect! I wrote more about it here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/a-tale-of-three-skeuomorphs. Cleaning required when flashing!

6.
Once you’re done with your shift (no pun intended) at the hospital, how about some Pizza? This is i-Opener, one of the many shortlived internet appliances, this one with a gimmick that keeps on gimmicking.

7.
Speaking of spacebar-adjacent gimmicks, I am mildly obsessed with how beautiful is this first NeXT keyboard from 1987, with a bunch of cool subtle things including a Command *bar* underneath the spacebar. As a matter of fact, I just finished writing an essay on it today!

8.
This is Olivetti Praxis 48: perhaps one of the most beautiful among the most beautiful typewriters, and strangely similar in palette to the above NeXT keyboard. You could turn on this (electric) typewriter just by pressing any key. That’s pretty wild.

9.
This Olympia Reporter typewriter is not beautiful, but it has a lot of POWER THIS and POWER THAT keys that celebrate its marriage with electricity? Why is X and some other keys red? Those are the ones that auto repeat!


10.
This is another typewriter, so proud of a functioning (erasing!) Backspace that it gives this a treatment I have never seen before or after.

11.
This Turkish typewriter (another Olympia!) means so much to me – the small success of this article from 2015 was probably what was needed for me to start thinking about the book: https://mwichary.medium.com/what-i-learned-about-languages-just-by-looking-at-a-turkish-typewriter-fc840aab1b0a

12.
This keypad… is so bad.

13.
This was meant to be mounted atop Commodore 64 (which I don’t have), an interesting reversal from the early typewriters being nothing more than repurposed music keyboards.

14.
These two are taking this idea even further – mount these overlays on regular keyboards to turn them into new kinds of interfaces.

15.
There’s also professional gaming. It was cheaper for me to buy QSENN keyboards and replicate what professional StarCraft gamers were doing in the 1990s, than to find a good existing photo of one of these keyboards.

16.
And speaking of gaming – we’re all used to the thumb style of typing from the first photo that it was fun to discover the short moment where the gaming keyboards looked like the one in the second photo.

17.
And a bit earlier, some game consoles tried to reinvent themselves as home computers with keyboard accessories. This is among the strangest of them: a “keyboard” to add BASIC to the Atari 2600.

18.
I commissioned this “joystick” from @benjedwards and I am so happy with how it turned out. It’s technically a joystick without a stick, but software turned it into a one-key keyboard. It’s F11, currently mapped to muting/unmuting in Zoom. It’s *incredibly* rewarding to press.