A brief history of keyboards! - Jesse Chen at !!Con 2024

A brief history of keyboards! I love looking at early designs for inventions before a standard design emerged. You can find wild, surprising ideas in the initial explorations of a concept, like with early typewriters! While browsing those out-there designs, I was gobsmacked to find a perfectly recognizable QWERTY keyboard, and had to know more. Why? How?? Let’s walk through what I learned, and how that design survived the intervening 150 years despite inventions like electricity, computers, and Dvorak! Jesse loves learning about the world and its surprising amount of detail, how it all somehow manages to work, and how it used to work. I mean, just imagine NYC humming along in 1924 with 6 million people, 600,000 telephones that could all interconnect, and 0 electronic computers. Presented at !!Con 2024 (pronounced, of course, "bangbangcon"!) in Santa Cruz, CA -- https://bangbangcon.com/ !!Con is a production of the Exclamation Foundation -- https://exclamation.foundation/ Video Production by Confreaks Follow Confreaks 👇 https://confreaks.com https://x.com/confreaks