FNFE: Chapter Notes · 7:01pm Jan 14th, 2018
Welcome to a big worldbuilding/headcanon dump!
This blog post is going to be a little bit weird, because in some ways I'd basically be re-telling the story if I gave you all the specifics. Suffice it to say that aside from the Cutter, all the different names of typewriter are names of actual typewriters.
See, the thing about typewriters is that they were invented quite a few times. According to Wikipedia, they were invented 52 times. I assume that this is because the idea is quite obvious—some mechanical way to quickly reproduce letters on paper—but the means of doing so is less obvious.
The earliest invention of the typewriter might have been in 1575, which wasn't all that long after Gutenberg had invented the printing press in the west (like with many things, the Chinese beat the West to it by a few centuries).
There were several different arrangements—not only the familiar one that we know from today, but the writing ball (used from 1865 to 1909)
and the indexing typewriter which had a spiritual successor in the label machine from the 60s (and my grandfather did have one)
Key arrangements and so forth varied over the years, and even as late as the mid-eighties they weren't the arrangement that we know and love on our keyboards.
I know you don't believe me, so here's a picture of an old Dell keyboard. Note where the quote key is, and then look at your own keyboard.
Now for the worldbuilding part. We know from canon that keyboards appear to have only two keys, plus a space bar.
As an aside, the return key was a lever on the platen.
One arrangement that would work is for the keys to be dots and dashes in pony-Morse. That's how I think they work in the OPP-verse. Then the pony-Morse gets translated by the typesetter before the finished copy is printed.
Other arrangements that would work are the rolling keys or sliding keys. Some people have proposed that they could move eight ways and while that's possible, it's hellishly mechanically complex. Five by five (up, down, left, right, center) would give you a nearly complete alphabet, and you could potentially have some sort of carriage shift to give you either capital letters or other options like numbers and punctuation marks [and we don't know how many letters there are in the pony alphabet].
I should also note that back in the typewriter days, it was expected that some keys would serve double duty (a lot of older typewriters don't have a 1; you use a lower-case l (and for those of you who don't see the difference . . . that's the point). You also had to do things like go back for underline (understrike) and use the half-space key to make things like hyphens (dash, dash, backspace, backspace half-space, dash).
The sliding keyboard does really exist in the computer era.
It's intended for people who can't touch-type for whatever reason, and it would actually be a practical keyboard for ponies—those of you who write PoE stories, take note of it.
Thank you for writing this, I wish the show would have more Pony only tools and things in the background. It would make it seem like more of it's own world then a mirror to ours. I keep getting so annoyed every time I look at Rockhooves' Shovel among other things.
You and your fancy-schmancy 1/2 space key! *shakes fist*
It could also be a device that moves a selector left and right along a row of characters, then the 'space bar' is more of an [enter] key to type the selected character onto the page. It would probably be possible to set it up so that double-pressing the space bar actually added a space, although that could make it difficult to enter words with two of the same character right after each other without having to go either left or right then back again to select the same letter twice. This could be set up so characters are on a cylinder, holding the space bar down and pressing left or right would rotate the cylinder to a whole new set of characters, you could have tons of different ones this way, each on its own row along the cylinder.
...Hum, okay, inherent problem with this is that without some kinda work-around, the character the pony was looking at on the cylinder would need to be backwards, and possibly upside-down assuming the cylinder section rotated as it swung to hit the page...
Or you can just use a minus sign as a hyphen.
As for high speed typing, how fast could Pinkie type out party invitations using a DDR mat eithre in 3*4 cell phone keycode, or directional codes with OSK?
Lots of fun things from the 80s. She could even use a Joyboard?
It's in exactly the same place!
I think this is actually a difference between US and European layouts, because I once had to fix someone's computer after they somehow accidentally set it to use the US layout, and pushing the " key printed an @ and vice versa.
https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-keyboard-layout-for-the-lazy/
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/voice_commands_2x.png
Oh man! The first computer I can remember using had that Dell keyboard!
4773451
You're welcome!
Me, too, although I do think that since their target demographic is little girls, they can't get too far away from the familiar. I think that's a lot of the reason why a lot of things aren't actually very hoof-friendly in the show.
4773486
I love my half space key.
4773495
That's plausible. That would make it basically an indexing typewriter; if you based the key placement on frequency in Equestrian, it could actually be fairly quick to type on, especially if the selector moved to center after each selection.
That would also be doable, although somewhat more complicated. One possibility is that the default 'center' position is no character (i.e., a blank space) and you have to go left or right to get particular characters.
Probably more than one or two carriage shifts would be excessively complex, but one's certainly doable. Some of it would also depend on how Equestrian is actually written, whether they have more or fewer letters than English, whether they use capitals, and so forth. For that matter, even how they write numbers. You could thin down the keyboard somewhat by not having numbers and writing them in pony Roman numerals, for example.
Actually, we don't know for sure if the spacebar only does one thing. It's possible it does different things if you press down on the left or the right.
You could solve that by having a repeater display on the front of the typewriter, where it would show what the selected letter was.
Also, it's worth noting that some of the early typewriter designs didn't let you see what letter you'd just typed until you advanced the roller. So having you type blind apparently wasn't considered a significant drawback in early human machines.
4773505
Yes, but if you want to differentiate between en dashes and em dashes, you've got to use the half-space key. That's one of the things it's there for.
On a non-electronic machine, she's going to be limited by the speed of the mechanism. I could out-type my dad's old Smith Corona, and I'd presume no matter what the key arrangement scheme, if it's fast enough that somepony would want to buy one, it's possible to type faster than it can handle.
That's probably too new tech for ponies, unfortunately.
They would be able to use Atari joysticks and paddle controllers, though.
4773519
It certainly might be. All the keyboards I've seen in the US over the last couple of decades have the " above the ' (next to the enter key), and the @ above the 2, but I've got an old Compaq keyboard that has the " over the 2 (and the @ over the '), and that's the arrangement I've seen on most typewriters.
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4773613
The first one I spent any amount of keyboard time on was a TRS-80, which had a more typewriter-y keyboard. Then we got a ][e, which is a more conventional computer layout.
4773655
A trash 80? Just dated yourself a little bit there Admiral. First one I ever used had a Pentium 133. Still had the old school AT keyboard though.
You don't need an exclamation point. Just type a single quote, go back, and type a period.
4773896
4773655
TRS80, eh? Beat me then. In computing I started a little bit later with a VIC20 and it had a different key layout again to what we know today (including having Function keys on the right, if I remember rightly) and was different to most typewriters of the day as well.
Those old Dymo embossing style label makers were amazing for the day... and durable?? I know of an old ag equipment workshop where the owner labelled the racking drawers and shelves in the 70s and many of the same labels are still there today... beats the new tape ones that often peel after a few weeks or months. (Is it bad to say I still have my father's and grandfather's ones in a drawer in my shed?)
Admiral, I like the ideas you and GeoPony have put together... an indexing typewriter with repeater display concept sounds like the most viable in mechanics and workability. Many older devices had repeater display systems that were mechanically synced with the internal mechanisms... complex, but many pre and post electro-mechanic devices were very much so.
I have one of these. I can see this being adapted for pony use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand
Hey Admiral... Is Onto the Pony Planet dead? It's just I love that story unconditionally. I know you can write whatever you want but I just thought I'd say that some people still want to see it continued. Thanks!
Your welcome
For the record, I still have and use my old plastic label maker. Works quite well. Office Max back about, oh, ten or so years ago was clearance out all their rolls of the tape, so I bought all their stock for like, ten cents a roll. Funny to me, since they still sell the stuff to this day, but eh, I didn't question it.
Those label makers are still being sold today. They're not popular at all compared to the electronic ones that print a inkjet style label. They require a bit of fiddling to use. They're very durable.
4776697
The nice thing about those vs. the inkjet ones that 4828296 mentions is that since they actually emboss the tape, you don't have to worry about the label wearing off because of sun-fading or chemical exposure. Plus (although this probably isn't a particular consideration), I'd assume that a blind person could potentially read the tape-embossed labels, but obviously not the inkjet style.
My grandpa was super OCD about a lot of things, and labeled practically everything with his label-maker.
4830518
You forgot to mention, they are very loud squeaky things that you need to press down hard in a certain way and need to put it in a certain way to cut it right. Other than that, it's great for what you need it for.
4830637
Yeah, they're a bit fiddly, but like any good tool, when you figure out how they're supposed to work, they do the job they're intended to do.