The earliest versions used spring-loaded keys to drive pins through holes to complete a circuit lurking below the keys. Bam, you just typed an MĮlectric keyboards tackled the problem of completing a circuit in all sorts of different (but still vertically intensive) ways. The mechanics of these early machines differed, but the cause-and-effect relationship was simple: Key goes down, lever goes THWACK. Compare that to the days of the earliest typewriters, in the 1860s, when the sensation of typing a letter was more like driving that key down all the way through your desk and 30 miles into the Earth's crust. The travel, sometimes called the throw, is most simply described as "how far the keys go down." With respect to their ancestors, the keyboards of modern laptops have comparatively little throw-they don't go down that far when you push them. From there, you can boil down a good keyboard to three main elements, according to Bingham: The travel, the snap, and the discoverability. And so there's a small but important vocabulary has sprung up to turn subjective feelings into quantifiable attributes manufacturers can observe, talk about, and-most importantly-control. That gut feeling may be good enough for you are me, but when you're designing one of the things, you need hard data on what makes a keyboard better. "You grab a specific configuration, type on it, and you just know, 'It's the one.'" "It's not like you see '50 percent less squishy' or 'New, improved clickiness' in big bright letters on the outside of product packaging," he says. I talked to Rob Bingham, senior hardware program manager for Microsoft and steward of the Type Cover project, about the subtle, under-appreciated qualities that separate the good from the bad, and the great from the good. There's no click, no bounce, no… what do you call it, anyway? It makes you feel like you're typing with mittens on. They quiver under the lightest touch as you drown in a sea of your own typos. Maybe you've never thought about what makes a great keyboard, but you know a bad one as soon as you type a sentence on it. You know a bad keyboard as soon as you type a sentence on it. The Touch Cover had been sterile and lifeless from the start, from the moment Microsoft built a "board" without the "key." But the Type Cover survived and improved. The story of these two weirdo twins tells us a lot about how we interact with a keyboard, what makes a modern keyboard work, and what separates a good keyboard from a bad one. Today the Touch Cover is no more, but the Type Cover, now in its fourth iteration, is easily one of the best thinnest keyboards you can find. Here, Microsoft squeezed your average laptop keyboard into an ever smaller package, one slim enough to function as a rigid but still normal-looking tablet cover, offering a typing experience much better than tapping on a touchscreen. The Type Cover, meanwhile, was a simple shrink job, but an impressive one. It was a radical and uncanny attempt to transform the keyboard, to reconsider its most basic elements. The Touch Cover was less than 3 millimeters thick and covered not in keys, but in almost imperceptible key-like bumps. And as part of that reveal, it also introduced two new but very different kinds of keyboards. In June of 2012, Microsoft announced the first devices in its new Surface line, twin tablets to take on the ascendant iPad while simultaneously challenging the idea of what a tablet could be.
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