Low-traffic newsletter with keyboard stories, once chronicling the progress of the book about keyboards (since published). Posts by Marcin Wichary. Read the archives first , or
I surprised myself in realizing that this year I already wrote three big essays about keyboards. I thought I’d share them here in case you missed them and you might enjoy a nice long weekend read! ⌘ I don’t know what is Apple’s endgame for the Fn/Globe key, and I’m not sure Apple knows either This was a classic Shift Happens endeavour, similar to a few chapters in the book, or perhaps the…
This is the last in a mini-series that started on December 21 . ⌘ I regretted not being able to put a DDR controller on that book spread , but I had one even bigger regret. It happened when I spotted this Shift key in a computer museum in Belgium in the late 2024: This was such a surprise. My book is called Shift Happens, I looked at a million kinds of Shifts, and yet I have never seen anything…
What was the first time you were impressed by the internet? I remember a few moments: a Polish site cataloguing the starships of Star Trek The Next Generation, a giant text file with the Pet Shop Boys discography, and the Home Computer Museum. Home Computer Museum is still around , unchanged since 2007. It feels exactly how I remember it, with the design harkening to much smaller screens and…
I mentioned in the previous issue a rare two-and-a-half-thousand key Japanese typesetting keyboard that I learned was thrown away before I asked about it. It was heartbreaking to learn that. But it’s even more heartbreaking to witness a photo of a rare keyboard in the moment of being destroyed. This above was a typesetting machine made by Berthold on the day of its unglamorous retirement.…
Speaking of Canon word processors , I still don’t know if I can fully explain the grasp Canon Cat (which occupied a big chunk of chapter 32) has on me. Perhaps Jef Raskin was just a fascinating person who deserves a great biography. Perhaps I read Jef’s The Humane Interface at exactly the right impressionable age, where its combination of art and rigor as applied to interface design molded me like…
As NEC was experimenting with the M system , elsewhere in the keyboard Sinosphere Canon was doing a different thing. This is Canon PW-10J, another “personal word processor” from the mid-1980s. I believe this category of “ kei word processors” didn’t really exist anywhere else. TRS-80 Model 100 and Z88 were ultraportable, but didn’t come with built-in printers. Wheelwriter and other “wedges” were a…
A small tidbit about Keyport 717 that caught my eye was people worrying about its memory requirements. If each key can output not just one, but more characters, and there are over 700 keys, that can quickly add up to a few kilobytes. In an era where your Apple II might have 16 or 32 kilobytes total , even two kilobytes becomes a noticeable tax. In Japan around that time, this kind of challenge…
As soon as the last copies of the book made it to people, I ran away from it toward other projects, none of them including print – a talk about pixel fonts , a long, wildly illustrated essay about Gorton , a highly interactive design piece using emulation in new ways , and a new homepage to bind them all together. Outside of a few small online “reprints” (I put up the contents of the Return/Enter…
Since the book will soon be delivered to about half the people who ordered it, with many to follow in the next weeks , I thought I’ll start sharing a few of the “making of” posts I had been thinking of. These will go deeper than before. Please, please let me know if this is interesting since they take a while to prepare. If you are looking for cool keyboards instead, I shared photos and a video of…
A few sentences of dialogue from a 1968 sci-fi book changed the way I look at writing. The book is called Tales of Pirx the Pilot and written by someone who’d become my favourite author – Stanisław Lem. Lem was a masterful literary world builder, and Pirx stories were no exception. The opening paragraphs weren’t wasted on clunky exposition or establishing shots. No, you were thrown straight into…
As the book is nearing its delivery, please check out the cute mini game I made out of the book’s slipcase . Click or tap to open Shift Happens Cover Stories Also, the book got a nice write-up in Ars Technica and I was on a short and sweet public-radio podcast . ⌘ The booklet cover story was cute and nostalgia-filled . In contrast, designing the rest of the book covers ended up among the hardest…
The book will start shipping soon! If you have lost track of Kickstarter updates, please supply or verify your address by following these instructions . If you are not a Kickstarter backer or later pre-orderer, I opened up a bunch of recent updates to everyone, and they might be interesting to read if you want to see more of the process of bringing a book to life: July update , photos from the…
The dream state of writing a book is the flow state. It’s romantic, this idea that the skies part and perfect words and metaphors and connections flow straight into your fingertips at the pace ideal for measured writing and satisfied reflection. The good news is that this actually happens. There were moments in the last few years where my brain stumbled upon a phrase I felt so happy about, I had…
Hello, friends! I’m finding Kickstarter kind of funny, because it separates milestones in strange ways. A successful Kickstarter is better than a failed one, of course, but a Kickstarter being finished doesn’t mean the books are in people’s hands quite yet. Stretch goals and initial funding muddle things even further. Are you supposed to quarter-celebrate each time around? Just wait until…
The Kickstarter for Shift Happens still has 10 days to go. Please help us get to $700,000 and unlock a free nice colorful third-volume for everyone by backing and spreading the word! And now for something completely different… ⌘ At first, Dana Sibera ’s explorations might feel like just strange hypotheticals, visual madlibs, bored evenings in Photoshop. Here’s one example. A Mac IIsi made of…
If you backed the book, you have seen some – but not nearly all – of this in my first (!) backer update . The campaign update The Kickstarter campaign was funded within the first two hours, and at this time it’s very close to being 300% funded, which is incredible. This means the book will definitely get printed – as a matter of fact, the printer is excited, too – and if more people back, the book…
Kickstarter I just pressed the Enter key at the right place, and the Kickstarter for my book went live . I hope you find it valuable and entertaining, and enticing enough to click on one of the tiers and then, too, press Enter at the right place. (Or use your mouse or finger, I guess, if you’re like that.) Please note: The early bird tier will only be there for 48 hours, and I wouldn’t want you to…
The Kickstarter for the book will launch on Tuesday, February 7, at 9am Pacific! I will send another email before so you won’t miss it, but you can also bookmark the Kickstarter page (although at this moment it is not particularly exciting). There will also be a livestream at 11am Pacific (2pm east coast time, 7pm London time) the same day. I will be joined by Robin Rendle – a designer,…
Happy New Year! The website for the book is ready at shifthappens.site . I’m really excited about it: you can see what the book is going to look like exactly you can learn so much more about what’s inside if you were wondering what the chapter names were all about, wonder no more! there are a few small games at the bottom (with more to come) you can learn more about what this book means to me and…
I’ve printed many versions of the book before using print on demand , but what arrived last week feels so much more important. It’s the first test from the actual printer in Maine I’m going to employ. Okay, this is really a test’s test. I wanted to print a sample chapter first to check out various tricky situations – dark backgrounds, small details, saturated colours – and pick between two…
In the chronology of my Spanish trip going haywire, the hard drive dying came on May 5, after me getting COVID and after the cat sitter locked herself out of my apartment, but before an airline kicked me out of the airport despite following all the recovery rules, and before the second airline lost my luggage. The drive was a relatively new four-terabyte SSD, and 75% of its contents were the…
I finally have some good news to share. We† found the right paper and the printer that knows what to do with it, and have all the verbal agreements we need. Things can go haywire still, but this is the current plan: crowdsourcing (likely Kickstarter) in February 2023 printing over the summer book publication in the late summer/fall 2023 I’ll tell you the complex story of the paper search later,…
There are some exciting new developments on the printer/paper front. If things go well, I’ll have something to announce next time! Please keep your fingers crossed. Have you ever seen a pinball machine being scared? Pinballs, already fascinating during their mechanical era, accelerated in complexity with the advent of microprocessors. Like many other things in the 1980s, pinballs too became…
All of the linked photos are compressed, but they come in the original 42-megapixel resolution from my current camera. Yes, megapixel wars were and are stupid. But trust me, these are the *good* megapixels. The famous saying goes “the best camera is the one you have on you,” but I keep changing my mind about what it means. In the early days of my interest in photography, this felt simple. “The…
Throughout the history of keyboards, a battle has been fought by two opposing camps. On one side, there were keyboards with the modifier keys – the Shifts, the Controls, the Commands. They appeared in QWERTY’s suburbia the moment typewriters needed uppercase and lowercase characters, and never went away. Typical layouts of 1880s and 1890s typewriters Early typewriters experimented with two, or…
What’s going on with the book There’s no easy way to put this. The book is ready to go. The writing, proofreading, typesetting are completely done, and photography’s incredibly close. The campaign video is 100% ready. The cool little site I made for the occasion needs just a few extra days of polish. But the book also needs to be delayed. All of this – regrettably, sadly, frustratingly – is owing…
I learned a thing long time ago, and it was: Once you print something, you can’t get it back. On the surface, this statement doesn’t make any sense. Scanners are cheap, and in 2021 some digital cameras are as good as scanners, too. Optical character recognition is so fast that it can happen in real time, leaving enough processor power for simultaneous translation to a different language. And I…
I’m writing this newsletter under duress. The last issue, one I sent just a week ago , arrived in spam folders for most people owing to a glitch in Revue – and I really wanted you to know about the livestream that’s happening this Saturday . But this also presents a fun opportunity. The many recent issues of the newsletter were complex mini essays, and it might be fun to do something much simpler.…
Quick updates first: I am aiming to release the book in 2022. There are still many unknowns, but people who know the printing process better than I am tell me this is doable. (I still have to go to to a museum in Spain, but hoping this becomes possible.) Let’s meet! I will be hosting a very informal livestream if you want to come: see some of my keyboards, and let’s just chat! This will be…
I open the door, exit the bar, and walk outside onto the sidewalk in a surprisingly straight line. It’s a nice, warm night. I hear muffled music coming from the inside, and the buzzing of the blinking neon that’s trying very hard to spell “Lefty’s.” I take a deep whiff and immediately regret it, being reminded of a large trash bin nearby. And then, it hits me: I’m a loser. I’m balding, fat, and on…