![]() ![]() It’s worth noting that all these overwhelming limitations didn’t prevent its technology from developing remarkably fast. Some typists simply arranged the blocks of characters based on their appearance frequency.Įvolution and technological lateral thinking This would be the equivalent of you arriving at your workplace and finding your laptop keyboard layout completely rearranged, only at a scale of about 96 times worse. One who worked in an office dealing with agriculture might put characters used to make words such as “farm,” “crops” and “harvest” near the top of the tray because those words were used frequently a typist in a police station would have a totally different arrangement, with characters used in words such as “officer,” and “crime” close at hand. Typists started reorganizing their trays to suit their needs. Times, some typists pre-arranged their layouts based on the purposes and the field of work it was meant to be used: However, according to an article about these technological wonders from L.A. One might wonder how to arrange the location of 2.500 individual blocks of symbols on a language that has no alphabetical order? Well, you’ve guessed it: there’s no layout order in the machine’s tray, as each typist has to memorise the symbols on her machine. It gets more and more fascinating the more questions we begin to ask. If it sounds like a slow and tedious process, it really is-apparently, a good operator could type as many as 20–30 characters per minute. Instead of typing the symbols (remember, no keyboard), the operator behind this Chinesische Hebelscreibmaschine has to use a lever that literally picks up one symbol at a time, moves the letter up to the paper, inks it, marks it, then returns it back to the tray. ![]() What we find instead, is a huge tray (or case) with lots of small blocks with symbols in a very snuggle fit, and by a lot I mean around 2.500 of them. Here’s a typewriter with no keyboard at hand, since the idea of fitting more than 3.000 characters into a QWERTY–like keyboard is as silly as it sounds. Just imagine what this means for a second, please. Image from Wikipedia Commons The workings ![]()
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