To celebrate the Kickstarter for Shift Happens going well, I thought I would show you 50 keyboards from my collection of really strange/esoteric/meaningful keyboards that I gathered over the years. (It might be the world’s strangest keyboard collection!)
This is technically a bit of a spoiler for the book, but a) a lot of them are not in the book, and b) the book comes out in half a year, and we’ll all forget by then!
Let’s start!
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
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.
19.
Speaking of strange keyboards, this is my “space cadet” keyboard – a mini keyboard that outputs only spaces, and instead of legends, each key *feels* different. Wrote about it more here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/stop-me-if-youve-seen-this-one-before/
20.
And here is a keyboard I built and hid in my shoes, made for one very specific reason. Are you interested what it is? Check out the whole story here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/to-walk-among-keyboard-magicians/
21.
This is one of the most rare keyboards I have – the strange abKey Evolution imported through a friend from Singapore – a keyboard that tried to reinvent perhaps one thing too many. Wrote more about it here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/the-worst-keyboard-ever-made-3/
22.
And this one from Commodore is not really that unique, except it has this fun property – it reverses the usual beige colour scheme making the keys inside darker. It’s kinda neat!
23.
This is a really cheap Bulgarian keyboard with such a poor build quality it cannot be unseen! I wrote more about it here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/the-worst-keyboard-ever-made-3/
24.
Oh, it gets worse. This calculator keyboard is so cheap it’s not a keyboard at all – just an exposed PCB with a pen to complete the circuit. More about it here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/the-worst-keyboard-ever-made-2/
25.
And this is the opposite, an incredibly well-built IBM Model F banking typewriter with an enclosure made out of zinc. Hefty enough to stop a bank robbery? Perhaps. More here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/to-save-a-keyboard-pt-2/
Halfway through! I need a bit of a break. Is this interesting? Should I keep going!?
26.
If your bank robbery goes poorly, you probably end up typing on this Swintec, transparent so that no contraband could be hidden inside. More about transparent tech for prisons in this Techmoan video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY
27.
This simple braille keyboard – Tellatouch – was gorgeous and important. Type a key on one side, and the right braille letter assembles itself on the other.
28.
This is a more modern version of an adjacent idea. Connect this device to a phone line, and you can speak even if you cannot talk. (Also, I just love any time a keyboard lands itself next to a segmented display.)
29.
The creators of this Seiko keyboard recognized a watch with a keyboard wouldn’t make sense – so you could dock your watch and type this way. (I don’t have the watch itself. Too expensive!)
30.
Just kidding! Here’s a keyboard on another Seiko watch. It’s an index keyboard – you don’t touch the keys directly, just move the cursor left and right like on Apple TV – since the keys are smaller than 1mm.
31.
This TI calculator for school use has tiny keys… in between other keys. What a strange thing.
33.
I love hybrid things and in-betweeners. This tiny Panasonic Toughbook asks a question: what if a BlackBerry keyboard, but twice the width?
34.
This one, for TermiFlex, is a one-hand operation, inspired by phone keypads. There are three shifts under your long fingers!
35.
Speaking of complex shortcuts, look at this Apple keyboard with Avid software keycaps. The icon on Z is my favourite. I don’t even wanna know what this function does.
38.
And *this* Sony keyboard had two numeric keypads going in two different directions! One for typical calculator use, and one inspired by mobile phones to allow to chat as easily for people who got used to chatting that way.
@mwichary This is best ad for the book possible.
@mwichary You have to 
@mwichary oh yeah! Giving your minidiscs titles seemed pretty amazing at the time.
@mwichary I owned one similar to that! Older, and lighter grey
@mwichary i had one of these, I miss the simplicity of the device that utilized it--a Visor Prism in my case.
@mwichary It was tragic that right about the time that Palm finally really figured out its smartphone OS and form factor, the company imploded because of the iPhone
The little butterfly keyboards always made sense to me - wish that there were a full-size one with the split keyboard layout because: Big Hands
@mwichary I had one like this for my Edge device, and it was surprisingly great.
Surprising, in that there was never an equivalent thing for iPhones.
I really feel like this should not have been an evolutionary dead end, but it very much was.
@mwichary I had one of these and loved it dearly! Unfolding it was always such a neat trick!
@mwichary Apologies for clearing up this mystery for you; I consulted my film editor brother and he says “it lifts out a clip”
@mwichary Ah yes, the shortcut to lifting I've been looking for. Right under my fingertips!
@mwichary Alt-Z is the Lift function shortcut. (Similar to cut, but for Avid, cut closes up gaps and lift does not.)
(he, him, his) @mwichary Ding! Ding! Boing! Tilt!
@mwichary I used to be a pinball fanatic. I never saw this calculator before and now I want one!!
@WildCard I got it only because I was a pinball fanatic, too. 
@mwichary this was TI's way of attempting to provide dedicated letter keys for programming while also evading American standardized tests' rules about what is considered an allowable "calculator" and what is an illegal "computer"
their later revision of this model has a rearranged keypad with the letter keys all together at the bottom, but notice that they're not in QWERTY order, one of the preconditions for being considered a "computer"
@mwichary TI couldn’t use QWERTY for calculators the wanted approved for use on standardized test.
@mwichary wow! I just saw a video where Penn Jillette was wearing this exact watch!
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxXw6obbMlEwgglS-DHq5chgFoogGZuTO7
@therealfitz @mwichary You can't go wrong following Penn Jillette for sartorial/tech advice. The man knows his stuff.
@mwichary I love the Apple Watch 8 (my first since owning a 1 for six months), but at some level I would like something like the Seiko that is low res but more up to date.
@mwichary "Is this interesting? Should I keep going?" Yes, please!
@mwichary I’m following it!
@mwichary Don’t knock the circuit stylus until you’ve tried a #Stylophone analog #synthesizer: https://stylophone.com
@mwichary Fran on YouTube did an interesting repair on one of these https://youtu.be/YKYfVfnQC00
@patrickcentral Oooh, fantastic. I have one that barely works and a later model that doesn’t work at all.
@mwichary The long dark tea-time of #Commodore clawing for relevance in a world where the popular market couldn’t see past the flood of #PC clones to their struggling #Amiga machines. Jack Tramiel knew how to fight a price war, but he was forced out and took over #Atari to seek revenge. Both companies ended up fighting over niches and scraps.
@mwichary I think Doug would have enjoyed your *augmentation*. He believed in BOOTstrapping after all.
(I got to spent a few hours with him once in Menlo Park)
In case you never came across it, a nice ACM puzzle I read once:
Explain why a keyboard lets Doug* log in when sitting down but not when standing up.
*I've forgotten whom originally
Pause here.
Answer:
Keycaps moved (prank) + touch typing when seated & two fingers when standing, not looking & looking respectively.
@mwichary I am reminded of The Eudamonic Pie.
@mwichary Also, in case it has escaped your notice… https://microship.com/bicycle-mobile-packeteering/
@mwichary a mechanical pun!