Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Much has changed in computing since the mid-1970s when I first took a computing class. What hasn’t changed much is that the keyboard and the display remain the most important parts of the computer to the vast majority of computer users.

In the mid-1970s, I walked into a computer class as a sophomore in college.

Lesson One: There are three parts to a computer – (1) processor (2) memory (3) input/output.

Not much has changed since then.

A Card-Punch Machine

In that class, and in the classes I took for the next several years, the input/output was a card-punch machine. I would type one line at a time – one line per card – and feed the deck of cards into a card reader. The lines of input would go to a computer that was somewhere else. It was slow, but it worked.

Fast forward to 1983. The computer industry seems to fast forward a lot these past 70 or 80 years. We have the first home computers or personal computers. We had 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives, keyboards, and display screens.

A Kaypro II Computer

I bought a Kaypro computer. It ran an operating system known as CP/M (control program, microcomputer). Two big reasons why I bought this machine among all the choices:

1. It had a good keyboard
2. It had a remarkably good display of characters

I have to emphasize item 2 from above. Kaypro didn’t use a dot matrix display like most computers of the 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, the analog engineers at Kaypro used the underlying oscilloscope to draw the letters as lines. To this day, I do have that machine in the closet, it is one of the best displays for writers you can have.

And so, that keyboard and display bring me to the subject of this post. Given all the wonderful technology under the hood of computers, the most important thing for users is still the input/output.

Consider the iPhone. Touch and swipe your finger. That is a clever substitute for a keyboard. Look at the display – all photographs. That looks pretty nice.

Consider the iPad. It has a very nice display. It has a lousy virtual keyboard; at least it is lousy for my use – writing. I added a bluetooth keyboard. Still a bit rough, but much better.

The more things change, the more we like the power under the hood of these new computers. We like all that computing power in the cloud that brings all the data in the world to our eyes and ears. Great stuff, but you still have to type on a keyboard. Yes, voice input and image input is here in a way. Those things are not yet perfected, so we resort to the keyboard.