Dana Collins’ Post

Origins of Computing – the Keyboard is Older than You Think 🦉 Some technologies are Fly by Night. Invented one minute, adopted everywhere the next, and gone just as quickly. Take the early plastic Bakelite. Invented in 1907 by Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland, it was an enormous success thanks to being electrically non-conductive and heat resistant and was used in manufacturing kitchenware🔪, toys🛴, cars🚗, guitars🎸, radios📻, televisions📺, communication equipment📞, and so much more. But by the late 1940s better, more durable, and cheaper to manufacture plastics had been developed and Bakelite fell out of favour. Other technological inventions though, stick around a fair while longer. ⌨ One such long stayer is the keyboard. Before reading any further, have a guess when the first typewriter was invented. Take your time, I’ll wait. … … 🕰 If you answered the 19th Century I can understand why. Many typewriters were invented in the 1800s. The design we take for granted today, the Sholes and Glidden typewriter with its QWERTY layout, was patented in 1868. But the earliest known typewriter dates back to 1575 when Venetian printmaker and publisher Francesco Rampazetto built the “Scrittura Tattile,” “tactile writer” in English. 🔠 Rampazetto’s Scrittura Tattile worked differently to modern typewriters in that it impressed letters into paper rather than using ink to stain the paper as later typewriters would, but it is the earliest known example of a machine using a keyboard to generate text on demand. 📚 For historical context, this was little more than a century after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and 140 years before the next writing machine would be patented – in 1714 by English inventor Henry Mill. #keyboard #history #technology #typewriters #originsofcomputing #engineering #historyoftechnology

For the past few years, as my attention has been directed to our typographic workshop https://lnkd.in/gSjxD6UP , I‘ve neglected my other website, the SpiekerBlog https://lnkd.in/ePNyQugc and Spiekileaks https://lnkd.in/ehZXE6jK; the blog should have both an English and a German version with all articlesin both languages. Spiekileaks mixes both languages on one site. I have just started updating old material on the blog, like links that lead nowhere, content that doesn’t feel relevant after a few years, and lots of mistakes. I have just updated both sites with articles in English. The German part of the blog should follow. As I’ve been out of touch for so long, I would appreciate comments, criticism, contributions (yes, I do like alliteration) in the spirit of cooperation. English is not my native language, so don’t be shy.

My new substack newsletter is up! Do visit and share with your friends :) #newsletter #art

The Gutenberg Parenthesis – how print shaped culture From the Gutenberg press to the word processor, a detailed trawl through the history of print offers lessons for the digital age https://ow.ly/fCVP50PEVoP

Paper is the most popular material on the planet. But why? And where did it all start? Let’s explore the story of paper... https://lnkd.in/gp7kAimf #qinprinting #printing #paper #history

Here's my latest post on Substack - the long process of making a complicated linocut when you're trying to get it right... https://lnkd.in/ekmnw-_3

#Article Minimal Non-C-Perfect Hypergraphs with Circular Symmetry" is available online. 💡 Authors: Péter Bence Czaun, Pál Pusztai, Levente Sebők, and Zsolt Tuza 📑 Free full text: https://lnkd.in/gPVVnf45 📚 Keywords: hypergraph; coloring; circular symmetry; independent set; upper chromatic number; C-perfect hypergraph #hypergraph  #coloring

I’m ‘writng’ this post to all of you folks with my new Montblanc fountain pen that I’m giving myself for Christmas⚠️🖊️✍️✒️⚠️ Globe & Mail Opinion - Barry Chudakov:!On the glorious anachronism of fountain pens.

The soundtrack of modern life pesters with pings and digital hollers, the nag of attention-snagging media. The more we reach and respond to ringtones, clicks and yelps of modern devices, the more we become like Pavlov’s dogs. We scroll on command, and are constantly reminded that our minds are someone else’s business model. 
Enter the humble – and no longer predictably inexpensive – fountain pen. The global fountain pen market reached US$956-million in 2022 and is expected to reach a billion dollars by 2030. There are more than 50 fountain pen companies in the world, and one estimate puts the yearly sale of fountain pens at more than 12 million.

Writing itself is about 6,000 years old, dating to when the Phoenicians used cuneiform to create an alphabet and craft messages. By contrast, the first record of a fountain pen is considerably newer, dating to around 974 AD. Left-handed people (I am one of them) more often use fountain pens than right-handers; no one knows exactly why. 
When ink flows out of a pen, the colour of ink chosen for your mood – Jacques Herbin Emerald of Chivor because your heart is full, Private Reserve Ebony Purple because it was recently broken, Noodler’s Southwest Sunset because it is spring – the fountain pen experience leaves a record of you on Earth; unique, personal, a registrar of reflection. Watching a ribbon of ink encountering paper (especially if you’re using a demonstrator, a clear acrylic fountain pen) is akin to watching the tumbling flow of water at a river’s edge. This is a writer’s ASMR, the only sound a travelling scritch the nib makes moving across pages. The fountain pen becomes a magic wand of thought flow, turning new perception into rope knots of words, and a collection of ideas into painted troughs of paragraphs. 
There is now a flourishing fountain pen community, a network of fountain pen-obsessed souls who support and seemingly cannot get enough of all things fountain pen. From Karst recycled stone journals and Graphilo fountain pen paper (a hot debate over Graphilo versus the new Tomoe River is brewing), to discussions of ink properties and colours (there are more than 800 inks for sale on the Goulet Pens website alone) to the uses of TWSBI wrenches or oversaturation of Brooks’s manipulations (colour patterns in a variety of pen brands), the fountain pen community is incessantly active on Reddit, YouTube and Instagram, and gathers at pen shows around the world to meet, greet and find out what is new and fabulous.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐃𝐨 𝐊𝐞𝐲𝐛𝐨𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐐𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐓𝐘 𝐋𝐚𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐭? ⌨️🤔 Why computer keyboards are arranged in the QWERTY layout, and not alphabetically? This design, which might seem random at first glance, is actually steeped in history and practicality.🌟🌟 The QWERTY layout dates back to the era of mechanical typewriters, invented by Christopher Latham Sholes in the 1870s. But why this particular arrangement? 🚨🚨 𝐈𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐲𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐣𝐚𝐦𝐬! Early typewriters had metal arms that would clash and jam if commonly used letters were too close to each other. By placing these letters apart, Sholes ingeniously solved this problem. 🔥🔥 But wait, there’s more! As typewriters evolved, the QWERTY layout became so 𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥. Thus, it remained the standard even in the digital age, long after the problem of jamming keys was gone. 🤩🤩 What do you think - is the QWERTY layout due for an update, or is it a classic design that should be left as is? Share your thoughts in the comments! 👇👇 If you enjoyed this slice of information, don’t forget to RE-SHARE! ✅✅ #TechHistory #QWERTY #KeyboardDesign #LKHOW #scientist #professors #teachers #developers

New research in Total Coloring of graphs. Now, we can say, as per the below preprint, that graph with maximum degree at least half of their order satisfy doubly weakened TCC. https://lnkd.in/gbucSySZ