Clicky clicky4/30/2023 That said, I think of the hundred keyboards I regularly obtain in one batch, and perhaps as many as 80 or 85 percent of them can be fully restored. "Often times, the spring tension doesn't feel right, or there's a deep gouge in the plastic, or a previous person put a property tag on it. "For any 30-year-old keyboard, there are a thousand little pieces of failure," Ermita says. "Originally, the plan was simply to document the variety and publish online some of the rich history of the Model M keyboards," he says. The force of the bent spring pushes the key cap (and your finger) back up.Įrmita began Clicky Keyboards to prepare for upcoming online academic database projects for Princeton. As you press the key, you feel progressively stronger resistance until the hammer snaps down on the electrical contact and the spring collapses. It's a simple design: a key cap mounted on a spring mounted on a hammer. IBM patented the buckling spring key switch in 1978. The means of activating that contact is mechanized. Keystrokes register by way of electric signals sent from a contact beneath each key, which are sent to the computer through a wire. Computer keyboards have no lever and no type bar. Typewriter keyboards feel the way they do because each key connects to a lever that, when pressed, acts on a type bar that presses ink to page. Though somewhat antiquated, these old keyboards still showcase some nice innovations. That "feeling" is exemplified by the Model M, and has helped create a surprisingly large market for a 30-year-old piece of equipment that weighs five pounds. Mechanical (or clicky) keyboards improve typing speed and help eliminate carpal tunnel syndrome-but the real draw is the tactile feel of typing on a real keyboard it's the reaction of feeling the physical switches under the keys. He finds, buys, rebuilds, and then sells IBM Model M keyboards to nostalgic, discerning geeks through his website. But no one better understands that romantic pull, or works harder to preserve it, than Brandon Ermita.Įrmita runs Clicky Keyboards, a side job to his regular gig as Princeton University's IT manager. That signature click-clack-probably louder than it should be in polite office society-generated by rapid-fire key presses with your flying fingers is something mostly lost to our touchscreens and our modern, ultra-slim, low-travel keyboards. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).Few things in the computing world are as viscerally satisfying as typing on an old-school mechanical keyboard. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), and express.js.Ĭurrently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.įinally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words.
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