I’ve used keyboards since I was young. I still remember typing with just my index fingers and needing to look at every button I was pressing. It wasn’t until I started playing online computer games that I really started typing faster and faster. Nowadays I can type without looking and use almost all my fingers, that might not be extremely stellar or amazing today, but it shows that keyboards have been apart of my life for a while and I use them constantly.

This is a mechanical keyboard I use mainly currently. I won it at the WSU 2017 Hackathon.(Photo by Timmy Huynh, August 2018).

I believe that keyboards are important for this generation because almost everyone knows how to use one effectively and almost daily, wether it’s for their job or just to communicate. Most kids these days i’ve seen take some kind of typing class to get them used to it at a young age. Their are many different forms of keyboards as well such as mechanical or membrane which are the two main keyboards types. But keyboards aren’t only physical, almost all smartphones these days have a digital keyboard for people to type and text on. There are many other examples of digital keyboards as well such as smart tv’s or gaming consoles.

Reading about the typewriters and word processors at the Media Archaeology Lab showed how far keyboards have gone and their evolution of being smaller and sleeker. many of the older typewriters and such were typically just the alphabet, numbers and basic function keys such as backspace and return. Now keyboards have so much more such as the number pad and many other function keys such as media keys or system keys like the windows button. One thing that old typewriters that do better than modern keyboards is the tactile feel of clicking on the keys and the amazing sounds they make. Mechanical keyboards are the closest modern keyboards can get to the same feeling and they perform much better but pale in comparison to typing feel.