Typewriters and Tablets

Open up a car or a generator and it’s easy to see what Jack Zylkin, creator of the USB Typewriter (see pic below) calls the “muggle magic of gears and pulleys and solenoids fitting together in perfect harmony”.



Zylkin says one can’t see the same magic upon opening electronic gadgets up. True, but just because you can’t “see” the harmony in your phone or laptop doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In any case, is it even worth anybody’s time to design an electronics gadget very well? After all, electronic items are born and die at Mach speed. It’s like evolution on steroids.

I find the combination of a digital tablet with an analog typewriter amusing: after all, the QWERTY keyboard was designed specifically to slow down typists (so that a fast typist on a typewriter wouldn’t cause the keys to collide), while pretty much every keyboard on a phone or a tablet today tries to speed up typing by predicting words as you type! Stone Age, meet the Digital Age.

Comments

  1. KumarOctober 27, 2011 at 7:40 PM

    I like your coinage "evolution on steroids"!

    Well, typewriter versus the latest generation mobile, may be considerably less than the extreme of stone age meeting the digital age. Science, technology, engineering, innovation - all these were pushers for the invention of the typewriter no less than the spirit of the same ingredients of the digitally driver world of today. In a sense the original printing press deserves more respect than today's high-tech printing process, because we work of packing well proved and well-known things to create these. The inventors of locomotive, printing press, automobile etc. had to be a lot more resourceful the hit to make the thing come alive.

    People may not believe this: the first computer built was obsolete on the day it was commissioned! Not because of higher technology edging it out, but because the inventors instantly knew what are all the inadequacies and the possibilities for the future computer. I would still consider the first computer a great achievement. Tremendously advanced technologies might have made us feel that they have pushed to first computer to stone age, but the spirit of invention and exploration was very much there in the "first ever thing".

    I respect those 'stone age' inventions for that spirit.

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