A few buttons have come and gone (goodbye SUPER and META, hello WIN and ALT/OPTION), but you can hand a standard keyboard to most any time traveller from the 70s and they would largely understand what is going on. By and large, keyboards from the early days of computers look very much like the keyboards of today (excepting the radical ergonomic designs that come around every now and then). A yet smaller population will gravitate towards typist-focused mechanical keyboards, the ones that use Cherry MX-type switches.įor all of the engineering innovation that has infused keyboard technology over the past 150 years (dating back to 1873, when Christopher Latham Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard, having previously experimented with a number of other layouts), not much design innovation has accompanied it, especially in the last thirty years. Others will think of gaming keyboards that have such features as macro keys and wild RGB backlighting. A few people will think of ergonomic keyboards that adopt strange shapes in the name of comfort. When most people first think of a keyboard, they probably think of the one attached to their laptop, or perhaps the one that came included with their desktop. The Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 (HHKB2) is not a keyboard for most people, but for 1% of people, it is the solution to a problem that most people don’t even know exists. Implied in the term is an excess of effort for the associated reward – if only 1% of people can appreciate what you’ve built, why build it at all? 1% solutions solve a problem that only 1% of the population has. There’s a term in engineering called a “1% Solution”.
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