khaosworks: (Spider)
khaosworks ([personal profile] khaosworks) wrote2005-12-17 11:18 pm
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In the useless toys category...

I give you Typewriter Keyboard, a Mac OS X shareware application that makes your keyboard do typewriting sounds when you strike the keys.

It's a small thing, but it makes me somehow feel, when I'm writing, that I'm writing, y'know?

Now, if only I could find some way to make the keys look like that on an old Smith-Corona, like Spider Jerusalem's...

[identity profile] cfred.livejournal.com 2005-12-17 03:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, that's what I'd seen before!

(And myself, personally, I sometimes miss the feel of the IBM 3270 terminal keyboards. The ones that would turn keyclack on when the terminal got thrown an error message. I always was fond of that form of user feedback, somehow.)

[identity profile] rimrunner.livejournal.com 2005-12-17 06:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Were those the ones where you could turn the keyclack on manually by pushing a button? We had those at a school district where I worked...in the early 1990s. (They were also still using a mainframe to crunch standardized test scores.)

[identity profile] cfred.livejournal.com 2005-12-17 06:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Yep. That would invert the setting: no keyclack when the terminal threw an error.

I'm not surprised they were using those; my HS system's bus route planners were using a VAX mainframe in 1988. Now, when I worked in a nonprofit's office and they had original IBM PC's, with cassette ports, in 1993, that was a little scary.