[HN Gopher] The beauty of the ampersand and other keyboard symbols
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       The beauty of the ampersand and other keyboard symbols
        
       Author : prismatic
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2021-03-27 21:55 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.spectator.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.spectator.co.uk)
        
       | lordnacho wrote:
       | Why do the special symbols go in different places on different
       | language keyboards? Makes little sense to me. You'd think most of
       | the keys on a keyboard would be more or less the same place, with
       | a few differences. Sticking to Latin based of course. But for
       | instance the @ is in widely different places between languages. I
       | mean I could understand if it was a language specific character
       | like those Spanish upside down ones. But for the others, why
       | aren't they more or less in the same place?
        
         | Blikkentrekker wrote:
         | Obviously historical reasons due to how typewriters in those
         | countries were once organized.
         | 
         | Keyboard layouts seldom seem to be particularly thought out,
         | and the strange position of keys today is due to the historical
         | reason of how the mechanical implementation of typewriters
         | worked.
         | 
         | The world is filled with rather unbecoming design choices,
         | simply in service of inertia.
        
           | lordnacho wrote:
           | That just pushes back the question though. If you're
           | importing the first typewriter from say Germany to the UK,
           | wouldn't you make minimal changes?
        
             | Blikkentrekker wrote:
             | How it actually went historically is that different brands
             | had completely different layouts until some sort of
             | standardization emerged within particular locations.
             | 
             | It is not as though one country had a standardized layout
             | before other countries started manufacturing typewriters.
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-28 23:01 UTC)