Shift Happens Cover Stories: guess the Shift keys of retro keyboards | Hacker News Reader

Shift Happens Cover Stories: guess the Shift keys of retro keyboards

shifthappens.site

FYI:

It's an advertisement for the book Shift Happens, a 3 part full-color book about the evolution of typewriters that was originally funded on Kickstarter and should be shipping soon (with limited overflow stock available). I'm patiently waiting for my copy: https://shifthappens.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

I heard about it on Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod, when they did a long interview with the writer about the process of researching and creating it: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/171-gratuitous-stroke

This is a fun tech demo but it's a terrible experience for a quiz (dragging around, not being able to see the keys on the other face, having to mouse over to reveal the important details)

And the time to load!!!

Also many of the keys are almost visually identical.

It actually crashes iOS Safari after a short while for me. Probably needs more gigabytes of RAM…

I dislike this new trend of trying to make your site's text look like LLM output. It's incredibly annoying to read at a fixed slow pace.

I think in this case it's because the book is about typewriters and it has nothing to do with LLMs.

I agree it's annoying but I think this particular site has some aesthetic reason to do this.

"LLM output"? you mean typing?

Especially since I have @prefers-reduce-motion set.

I'm curious if the average developer would consider text appearing with no actual motion (no scale, pan, translate, fade, no tween whatsoever) a candidate to disable for @prefers-reduce-motion

I suspect the average web developer doesn't know or care about @prefers-reduce-motion (even less than @prefers-color-scheme), but for the few that do, I would expect to err on the side of caution, eliminating any animation and any page change that is not made absolutely necessary by user interaction.

tbf it predated LLM output by a fair margin. But mostly agree, my firefox on a decently powerful laptop was jerky enough I turned it off.

Yes, I was recently playing some retro games from the 8-bit era and lots of them did it with clicking noises that I assume were meant to simulate a teletype.

This little game is an offshoot of Marcin Wichary's painstaking process producing his book Shift Happens. You can read a bit more about how he came to build a 3d viewer simulation of his book covers here: https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/cover-story-pt-...

That's just one of 46 newsletter entries. Marcin's been working on this book now for 5, 10 years. And documenting the process in meticulous detail, down to choosing and testing the varnish for the slipcover and then simulating shifting light across it in a browser game. It's been a delight to follow along and I can't wait to get my copy of the book.

This is unreadable.

Contrast exists for a reason. Grey on grey is not contrast.

Please make it readable.

Well I won't buy the book obviously written by artists who think things just need to be pretty but not by designers who look at the functionality as well as the prettyness

This is the slipcase cover. The actual book has black text on white paper.

Yes but I was talking about the game - I ignore cover designs partiually for this reason.

Springer-Verlang textbooks and gollanz fiction are much better - pretty plain black (or simple pictures) on yellow or white

purple and white on a darker purple? Nothing unreadable on the game pages. Check your levels?

WHat do you mean by levels? I see no white (well the key names are but you don't see them until you click. Purple on purple is just not readable. Purple on white as the text on the page is would be much better.

The keys in the game are grey on black. 9OK shades of purple) Safari Arc and Firefox tried

I don't know about others, maybe it's just me, but the book vs key contrast is so poor, I can barely make out the shapes even.

What a cute and creative advertisement for a book! I wouldn't mind seeing more like this.

On mobile this page is sadly hardly anything but usable. I would have loved to play it but is a real drag.

Byron Brooks invented shifting type, and hence the shift key.

https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2011/05/byron-abrooks-sci-...

I honestly can't say I've ever seen a computer keyboard that has a symbol on the shift key. The text implying that it's common took me quite by surprise.

It's less common now but pc keyboards always had the empty up arrow on shift in the 80s/90s and still common into the oughts: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/IBM_Mode...

I’ve got 4 keyboards in front of me and not a single one of them have the word shift. All English QWERTY keyboards too.

These are British keyboards though. So maybe this is a European vs US keyboard difference?

Seems to be US vs Rest of the World, for Apple at least. Change the language here and watch the image change: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MK2A3B/A/magic-keyboar...

The crappy Dell KB813t that The Company has provided me has an outlined up-arrow.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-keyboard-smartcard-usb/...

AZERTY keyboards for instance have it, since "Shift" is not a native French word (sometimes they do write "Maj.", but mostly they simply use the arrow). Also happens with some keys such as Caps Lock (a padlock symbol).

All of my keyboards have only an up arrow, not the "shift" word. They aren't english keyboards though.

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