Marcin Wichary
@mwichary
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@mwichary @mastodon .online · Wrote a book about the history of keyboards: · Design manager @figma · He/him
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Part of the fun of being an (amateur) historian is discovering connections like these.
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Earlier this month,
@hannahjdotca
alerted me to the existence of this weird novelty calendar with a cat in front of an old HP computer. I couldn’t help but grabbing it and scanning it all.
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Workshopped a bunch of emoji ligatures for more complex and underrepresented feelings.
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So, something magical happened to me today, and I wanted to tell you all about it.
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Fascinated by UIs that accidentally amass memories. One of them is the wi-fi “preferred networks” pane – unexpected reminders of business trips, vacations, accidental detours, once frequented and now closed cafés.
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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!)
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Things that surprised/amazed me about Japan, an ongoing thread.
(More likely UI than food, but you know this already.)
It’s my first time here. Please comment away and/or point out my cultural insensitivities!
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AND THEN I SEE THIS. I don’t actually have a good photo, but the third floor is five rooms filled with HUNDREDS of typewriters.
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Whatever it is that you care about, I hope you get to experience the kind of discovery that I did today.
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What we thought of the internet in 2001, according to the keyboard of one of the internet appliances.
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Then I type on the first Sholes and Glidden, from 18-whatever-the-fuck. This is where QWERTY started, and I AM TYPING ON IT.
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This is among the weirdest/funnest artifacts I have: Inside The Personal Computer, a pop-up book about “the wondrous world of personal computers.”
It’s a “sensational new book teaches you everything you need to know.”
And it’s from 1984.
Shall we…?
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I visited three different Dutch computer museums last week, and they were so great I wanted to tell you about them a bit more.
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And literally, the first thing that greets me is a Bar-Lock typewriter. A glorious one, with a gorgeous cover…
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Hello, stranger.
I’m glad you decided to join me on this impromptu tour of a somewhat forgotten era of computing: the time when Screens Were Expensive – and so computers had no choice but to use smaller screens, small screens, and even ridiculously tiny screens.
Shall we…?
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Shhhhh. Don't tell PC manufacturers they can brand their spacebars.
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About two years ago, I started going on long city walks. Yesterday, I celebrated my 150th one!
You can see when exactly did I fall in love with the Sutro Tower (and Stern Grove before it), and when did the lockdown start (every walk starts/ends at my old apartment).
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It’s very proto-lolcat in nature. The premise is largely that Morris hates the high technology of the 1980s…
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@Shpigford
One of the biggest red flags is hiring managers treating hiring as an algorithm.
If you’re reducing candidates to numbers without any context or empathy, you’re not the right fit for me.
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A crazy rare (two copies!) Hansen writing ball using the Moon alphabet, an alternative to Braille.
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I am seriously fascinated by the weird anthropomorphized illustrations of mainframe computers from the 1960s and 1970s. I find them all the time now in my research.
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Okay, more photos.
Check out the most beautiful Shift key ever.
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…which is a fascinating mixture from the perspective of 2019.
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I find the dual Imperial I talked about in one of my Ignite talks. I never thought I would see it in person.
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…and a non-shifted keyboard. And, one can touch it! So I do, immediately.
I am typing on a Bar-Lock!!! This was already worth it.
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There’s also some (unintentional?) sociopolitical commentary, and fashion snark.
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At this point, I literally have tears in my eyes. I’m not kidding. This feels like a miracle.
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Who has two thumbs and used them to shift this vintage Franklin? THIS BRO.
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To think I could have so easily missed it…
And, by the way, I never made it to Dalí Museum. This was surreal as it was. :·)
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This kind of feels like a dream.
Not figuratively: I have had dreams like this, finding an awesome place that I didn’t even know existed.
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An abridged list of actual HOLY SHIT TERRIFYING error messages from an early word processor (WPS) from 1976.
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Your tweet archive from Twitter doesn’t contain your images. I wrote a script that downloads all images locally.
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Now I am going back to some castle in the mountains that is sketchy af. If I don’t come back, please remember me through this thread. 0_O
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I’m perplexed at how this was made. Did they really take the cat outside for these?
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…and a few more in the Complicated Emotions emoji series.
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This week, at a lightning talk event inside
@figmadesign
, I gave this 5-minute talk.
I think you’ll like it! I’ve never put so much new tech and practice into a talk before.
This is a recording of me doing it live, without any post production or editing:
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13. This UI might not be specific to Japan, but that’s not going to stop me from FALLING IN LOVE.
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A Photoshop mock up I made in 2002 vs. a new keyboard just announced by Logitech.
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I’m writing a book about keyboards!
Sign up to the mailing list for updates and instant access to cool stuff:
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This is the most amazing PDF title page I have ever seen.
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DOUBLE DASH key, where have you been all my double life.
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This portable typewriter has been used in the field during World War I.
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I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON HERE, BUT IT IS AWESOME.
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And, apparently, Morris was on a few more calendars around the same era:
(My friend tells me it was a pretty popular “commercial cat” of its time – but this is all news to me.)
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What happens when you press a key (interactive!). So much more complicated when you try to make your typewriter quieter.
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My book about keyboards, Shift Happens, is now on Kickstarter!
There is all sorts of new information about it, and a video, and what I think are very cool tiers and rewards on top of a very cool book.
Please back and spread the word!
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There are like 2.5 old grainy-ass photos of it on the internet in total AND NOW I AM TOUCHING IT WITH MY OWN DIGITS.
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I’m sure it has been done before, but this is the original 176 emoji alongside their modern, high-fidelity equivalents.
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This is the third big project I worked on since joining
@figmadesign
. It was scary and exciting and tough and weird – and we’re not done yet!
If I were to write a blog post talking about the process of getting this out, what would you be interested in knowing?
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I type on a few early index typewriters for the first time in my life.
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This is some sort of a cypher machine from Germany. Like a proto-Enigma.
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I love this story of the most unusual cryptographic device you can think of… a Barbie Typewriter!
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I’ve been trying to find a good photo of a 1970s/1980s microcomputer store for my book and I haven’t had great luck – but sharing what I found so far could make for an interesting thread!
This is 1983 in Sunnyvale, CA:
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One of the fascinating things about the 1976 Apple I computer was that it was only sold as a board – you had to bring your own keyboard, screen, and power supply.
That meant every single Apple I was different. Here’s a gallery celebrating some of the most interesting ones.
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I have never seen so many typewriters under one roof. Not even close.
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A part of me is really sad I will never in my life walk past a building at night with a huge computer inside.
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As I am going up, I see some posters of typewriters, but I don’t make too much of it.
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I got this calendar used, so I also have all of these pages filled out with urgent activities of 1986 – which, I’ll admit, is kind of creepy.
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How NOT to use a logo is always my favourite part of a design/brand style guide. Twitter’s: “Do not add anatomy.”
What fun ones did I miss?
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Small, but fun update to
@figmadesign
this week: Now transparent colour styles will properly reflect opacity, so you can orient yourself better in all your shades of black and white!
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8. The toilet seat raised itself as I opened the restroom door and FREAKED ME THE HELL OUT.
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22. All the vending machines I used so far (three) used lights to show me what I could afford after putting in money.
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A periodic reminder that we really have no idea what we’re doing most of the time.
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As I am walking towards it, I see this sign pointing the other way, saying “Museu de la Tècnica,” with a cute gear icon.
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In the manual for Apple IIc Plus, a scene I don’t fully understand.
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There finally is a site for my book about the history of keyboards.
I think you’ll enjoy it. There are quite a few fun/interactive things in there, and you can sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter is ready!
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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.
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À propos nothing, a little appreciation of CGA typography.
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I’m driving from Barcelona to the edge of Pyrenees, but my friend tells me to detour to the little town of Figueres, for the Dalí Museum.
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From the brochure she gives me on a way out, I realize I was insanely lucky. This museum is not usually even open on Thursdays.
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We’re hiring at
@figmadesign
for a new, exciting role: a product designer to help build design system features within Figma. Come help us envision and build the future of design systems tooling!
Please apply here, or reach out to me (DMs open):
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At some point, it occurs to me that she is not explaining anything. She’s just trying to kick me out… the museum closed a while back.
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This is my talk from Config,
@figmadesign
’s first conference. It’s 20 minutes on typography, keyboards, weird bugs, and complexities of building anything that deals with fonts.
I’m happy with how this turned out, and I think you’ll like it:
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I don’t even know what to do. There is tons of stuff here. Eventually, I compose myself.
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Say hello to Canon Cat – a magical, forgotten machine from the late 1980s.
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Years ago, I used to obsessively go to Apple PR site and download all the hi-res photos, and now I have this peculiar Jonny Ive White Room Museum Of Forgotten Apple Products.
Can you name or identify all these?
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It is very comforting to me there have always been and will always be people who’ll go above and beyond for great typography.
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Wanted to share a bit of the process of building Selection Colors, a little
@figmadesign
feature I feel rather (maybe strangely) proud of.
(This was originally meant to be a blog post, but the Covid-19 situation is sapping my energy…)
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Accidentally stumbled upon this amazing treasure trove of hundreds of beautiful/awful 80s tech logos. It sort of feels like a version of that “Bobson Dugnutt” screen, but those are all real.
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Another? The alarm page and its history of painful negotiations with early mornings. (One of these, I’m sure, was for a lunar eclipse; another for sending a friend in Europe a “good luck” text.)
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