Soon, someone came out with a different keyboard.
This is Blickensderter.
It was faster, it was lighter, it was cheaper.
And also, it did not jam.
And the reason it didn't jam was it used a ball, sort like an IBM Selectric,
if you've seen one of those.
It has a little ball with all the letters on it, and it would go that way.
It was mechanical.
It was about 20 years later.
In fact, it was very, very superior to the Remington from a technical point of view,
but was unable to take over.
What had had happened in the intervening 20 years.
So when Remington bought the rights to the Sholes keyboard,
to the QWERTY keyboard, they started a number of secretary schools.
They started professionalizing, basically, the profession of being a secretary.
They had people learn how to do it.
So they had about 20 years of head start, and even though something came
along that was better, faster, cheaper, they were unable to unseat it.
The people said no thanks,
because the keyboard layout was different than the corded keyboard layout.
And I've had something like the Dvorak keyboard, nowadays you have an option in
a computer you can actually change the keyboard, and yet people don't.
Why not?
Well we have this installed base, there's knowledge in the world,
we know how to do it, we notice way this infrastructure is there, and so
our producer keyboard that looked like one of these other things here,
it would be hard for people to learn.
I couldn't be insured that there are enough people in the world to
knew how to do that.
The QWERTY keyboard on the other hand,
I can assume that everyone knows how to use that keyboard.
There's other keyboard, the piano keyboard.
This things drive me crazy, it's got like three keys, and two then three then two,
the black keys, and
then there's some place sometimes people know often they go they push,
they know which move was one to push is really is actually kind of perplexing.
Actually I know how to play the piano and it's still perplexing to me.
Because as we try to learn more and more things it's not intuitive at all.
And yet, if you were to produce something that you're going to call
a keyboard it pretty much has to look like this because there's a history and
so in that history creates obligation for going forward.
Unless what I was doing had something to do with these keys,
I probably should pretty much stick to that kind of keyboard layout,
if I want to assume there are people in the world who can actually use the thing
that I'm proposing, the innovation.
Back around the time of the invention of the gramophone, Thomas Edison, what he
would do is we had the gramophone and then a live person play behind a screen,
and try to get people, train people to hear the difference between them.
To say, you know what,
in fact, this device is actually, this gramophone is actually
superior to this person playing because the person playing will make mistakes.
It won't sound as good.
It doesn't sound in the same way as this gramophone here.
And so it has reverb, it had all sorts of things.
The sound of the room came with the gramophone
which is where the person behind the screen didn't sound as good.
And so what was happening was that these understandings in the world about what
music is,
what does it mean to consume music, that he was actually changing by doing this.
In fact, this was an early version of the, maybe of a generation
where you remember there's some ads that were, is it live, or is it Memorex?
And so he was doing this a long time before that.