Recently, I read a Willam Gibson novel called The Difference Engine. The premise is that computing became popular a century or so earlier, based on Babbage’s designs for, well, his difference engine. In the world of that book, hackers are called “clackers,” presumably referring the noise made by the giant steam-powered machines - or maybe specifically the punching of punch-cards.
In my world, the clacking noises are coming from the Unicomp buckling spring keyboard that I’m typing this on right now. This thing’s as freaking awesome as the original ones were, back when the PC-AT was the i7 of the day and there were four colors, including black, in the world. But I digress.
I mention this because we discussed these keyboards earlier in the blog, and I was inspired at the time to order one. But I didn’t use it much until recently. In this recliner that’s situated before one wall-mounted oracular 1080p TV, I’ve a used a Logitech wireless backlit keyboard for a long time. There were advantages to that thing, like it was was obviously better in the dark than this unlit one. When the battery felt like holding a charge, anyway.
I can live without the backlighting, though; I can type without seeing the keys. It took me a good dozen years, but I did eventually learn to touch-type. Conveniently, these buckling spring keyboards are much easier to touch-type on than any other keyboard ever invented, for a very simple reason. Two words: accurate feedback. Once your fingers have learned how hard and deep they need to mash each key, you can just let them fly without worrying about missing any keystrokes: each and every clack guarantees that the key you typed actually registered.
“Modern” keyboards, by contrast, give inconsistent feedback in the form of mushy, tentative presses and uneven returns. As a result, you never know whether you’ve actually typed what you meant to until you see it on the screen. The head-bobbing and eyeball-bouncing this engenders constitutes a sort of writers’ equivalent to digital photographers’ “chimping” phenomenon. Instead of pouring out your daydreams efficiently through confident fingertips, your focus thrashes between keyboard, screen, whatever body parts happen to itch, the 100 other distractions around you, and such bits and scraps of ideas as you can remember in between.
This tawdry little dance—which we could call, say, “chumping”—is all too familiar to me, especially lately. For the last several months I’ve done all my book writing on a mac laptop keyboard. Some people may claim to like those flat, featureless rubberized scrabble tiles…but whoever feels that way is not a fast typist, I can tell you that for free.
In a proactive effort to combat this very issue, I ordered a second Unicomp keyboard, in this case designed for a mac. I set it up neatly alongside the rest of the mac docking station type gear. Unfortunately it gets zero use, because virtually all of the writing gets done with the computer in my lap in an armchair somewhere. Maybe someday I’ll attempt creative writing in an office setting. But for now, I’ll have to remain a slave to the routines I’ve carefully cultivated to get the work done by any means necessary.
Maybe I’ll relearn how to type on a Dvorak keyboard again, while I’m at it. They make a buckling-spring Dvorak, don’t they?
No comments:
Post a Comment