The Gonville Joke

I've come to realise that much of my life for the last thirty years has been dominated by that modern child of Gutenberg, Turing and Christopher Latham Sholes — the computer keyboard. We have come a long way, from mechanical typewriters with their jamming type levers, to the electrical 'golfball' machines, to tape punchers and teletext, and now, in this age, to holographic or membrane keyboards that occupy little or no physical space.

In my head, the keyboards come and go; and if they talk, it is not of Michelangelo.

I remember thinking that the extra keys on a keyboard were a lot like life, each with a rich history behind them which has since been forgotten. The ESC key really did let you escape from an otherwise unproductive sequence of events; the CTRL key really did allow you to take control of processes. There used to be a difference between ENTER (as in data entry) and RETURN (as in CR, or carriage return) and LF (as in line feed, adding a line).

A TAB was the little metal marker you put on a mechanical keyboard to force the machine to stop at a particular point. CAPS LOCK used to be SHIFT LOCK, giving the upper set of characters for levers with two characters at their tips. You could feel the SHIFT when you held the SHIFT key down; the whole keyboard mechanism was shifted.

There were no function keys until software came along. I remember using a dedicated word processor which you could program so that each code would print an entire paragraph or document. There were no COMMAND keys until Apple put them there, and for decades, Windows machines continued using CTRL for that, and sometimes ALT.

The space bar was a lovely thing, in the old days. You depressed it, and the entire carriage moved one space. If you kept pressing it, the carriage would sound like a little lawnmower, chugging one space at a time to the left so that your next key would print one more space to the right.

Nowadays, the idea of a mechanical typewriter would be labelled 'steampunk' or 'retro'. But I will miss the nights I was lulled to sleep by my insomniac father's two-fingered typing, his long, strong fingers jabbing down at the keys as they clacked away on the paper mounted in front of him.

The Gonville Joke, he once referred to it as. That too is part of my past.