February 25, 2020 — One of the questions I often come back to is this: how much of our collective wealth is inherited by our generation versus crea

How Old Are These Keys? Five Eras of Human Progress

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2024-04-28 18:00:08

February 25, 2020 — One of the questions I often come back to is this: how much of our collective wealth is inherited by our generation versus created by our generation?

I realized that the keys on the keyboard in front of me might make a good dataset to attack that problem. So I built a small interactive experiment to explore the history of the keys on my keyboard.

The oldest symbols (letters) are close to the center, followed by the Hindu-Arabic Numbers, surrounded by the punctuation of the Englightenment, surrounded by the keys of the typewriter, surrounded by the recent additions in the P.C. era.

I got this idea last week and couldn't get it out of my head. Yesterday I took a quick crack at it. I didn't have much time to spare, just enough to explore the big ideas.

Next I found the great Apple CSS keyboard. I stitched together the two and it seemed to be at least mildly interesting so I opted to continue.