Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you

Marcin Wichary 18 June 2026 / 7,700 words / 38 playgrounds On designing finger-friendly interactions A hundred or so years ago, there was a problem. People were simply typing too fast. I know what you’re thinking: they were typing too fast for the primitive typewriters of that era. But contrary to popular belief, typewriters were never that primitive. You could type really fast on even the first popular typewriter, and the QWERTY layout was actually designed to allow you to do just that. No, people were typing too fast for what we thought our bodies were capable of. With our understanding of neurons travelling inside our brains, processing of the senses, and physical capabilities of the fingers, typists should have maxed out at just above 40 words per minute. They routinely did 70 words per minute or more. It turns out, fingers are time travellers. At any given moment, each one is living in a slightly different time – as one finger is moving down to press a key, another is already travelling to the next one, and your brain is thinking of a few keys in advance, visualizing your hands moving to the right place. A 1897 photo of a dispatching station for Michigan Central Railroad, with two typewriters visible None of this requires touch typing. What we eventually called overlapping happens even if you reside at the awkward intersection of “hunt” and “peck.” Overlapping is a small miracle happening in front of your eyes, and it happens pretty much to everyone. A capability of our hands and brains to treat our fingers relatively independently, and allow them to move at their own pace without waiting for other fingers (on the same hand) to finish. Also, it’s far from the only miracle. Our hands are amazing, our fingers are amazing, and our brains are amazing, too. Altogether they are capable of feats that not so long ago made absolutely no scientific sense – and sometimes still don’t today. Artists and performers have known that intuitively for centuries. Today, a lot of creativity and productivity happen onscreen, but our interfaces do not often respect the fingers the same way older instruments did. I want to tell you more about it, and about your responsibility, as a designer, to make sure they do. The early lessons in optimism This is an interactive essay.

You can turn off the sound, keep track of your tasks, or navigate using the menu at the top of the screen. Your progress will be saved between sessions. When computers were refrigerator-sized machines hiding in rooms humming with the best of 1960s air conditioning technology, any interaction with them was appropriately cold: the only contact they allowed was remotely, via a terminal. A terminal was a desk computer with the expensive parts taken out. It had a bad CPU, little memory, and scant logic. Early on, it had no screen either, and used a printer or even a typewriter as its human-facing interface. An old computer with an onsite console for technicians and operators, and an example of a faraway terminal for actual users. The concepts of a console and a terminal survive today in software form. Given these limitations, the simplest way to build keyboard operation was this: each keystroke had to travel all the way to the big computer via a slow modem, and only its echo was printed when it came back to you, after The Machine confirmed its arrival. That roundtrip created a delay. That delay made typing extremely unpleasant: Typing with a slow echo Click into the input field and type your full name Terminal Latency Input inhibited It was sometimes even more unpleasant than what you experience here: an ear-piercing beep or, on top of that, the terminal physically locking the keyboard. (Do you know that feeling when you are walking downstairs and you slam your foot on the ground, because you thought one more step was still coming? Imagine that happening to your fingers, all the time, throughout the day.) The first solution to this problem was to create a buffer, so you didn’t have to wait to type the next keystroke. The locking or the beeping now happened only when you typed so fast you filled up the entire buffer: Typing with buffers Click into the input field and type your full name Explore latency and buffers to see how they feel Terminal Latency Buffers Buffers in use Bfr overrun The delay was still there. But as long as the keys themselves aren’t dirty or sticky, it shouldn’t matter, right? After all, fingers are so good that they don’t need confirmation from your eyes.

Fingers are so good that they sometimes press Backspace for you, without you looking, without you even realizing, just because they can sense on their own that the previous key press was misplaced. But by the 1960s typing evolved from just retyping memos to creative writing, programming, and other less rigid forms of using the keyboards. Arrow keys arrived first; displays entered the picture soon afterwards, and then full screen menus entered that picture. If you’re not looking at the keyboard, where else will you be looking at other than the screen, continuously and hopelessly delayed? And you’re never supposed to be looking at the keyboard – this is actually important for motor memory to develop! Evolution of computer keyboard use in the 1960s and 1970s – from command line, through forms, to menus So, the next invention was something called “local echo.” Local echo was a white lie. Your keystroke was now shown on the screen immediately and optimistically, assuming it makes it to the computer undisturbed. It seems like the most obvious solution, but it does add complexity over what came before: now your terminal can’t truly be dumb, and you have to deal with configuring both sides of the system so that only one echo is present, instead of zero… or two: When the confirmation of an action is shown on the screen immediately, before it gets transmitted back by the server or the computer. This is done to make the UI appear to operate faster than it does. For updates that are important, special accommodations need to be made to check and convey to the user if the update confirmation never arrives (e.g. the optimism was misplaced). Typing with a local echo Click into the input field and type your full name Play with latency and echo options Terminal Local Remote Echo In this way, we traded some of the newfound computing power to recreate something we already had fifty years before: typing operating at the speed of fingers. But not before the slow transmission speeds already put its imprint on the software of this era; the cryptic short commands of Unix and the mega-cryptic interface of a popular editor vi are both reported to be optimized for a soon-to-be-gone era. This will be a theme of this essay. “Fifty years before” was 1910s – the first era we started analyzing and understanding typing.

But the early mass-produced typewriters arrived another half a century earlier than that, and piano keyboards were even older. This means our deeper understanding of fingers and typing arrived mostly alongside the typewriter, not ahead of it. 1870sFirst QWERTY typewriters 1890sExperiments in touch typing 1910sQWERTY and touch typing standardized 1940sFirst work in ergonomics (a.k.a. human factors) 1950–70sInstitutional computers 1980–90sHome (micro)computers Late 2000sModern multitouch smartphones and tablets The early timeline of keyboard use Best example? The rise of touch typing. The first popular QWERTY typewriter was designed to be fast – one of the first use cases was writing down Morse code signals in real time, and those casually reached 50 words per minute. That speed, miraculously enough, was available with what today we’d call hunting and pecking. Touch typing manual covers The arrival of the keyboard made people dream of more, including the vaunted notion of transcribing someone talking in real time. In search for that dream, multiple people chipped away at “touch typing” – nine fingers on the keyboard, eyes off of it. The effort took decades to develop, many saw it as a fad, and no one fully agreed on what “proper” meant for some years more. Touch typing on typewriters never achieved transcription speeds for human speech, which are estimated to be about 150wpm for English. For that, special steno keyboards are necessary, which type in syllables and enable chording (pressing many keys at once). By the 1910s, touch typing was properly established and rather popular, and stayed with typewriters until the end of their time. But the early and awkward computers (and terminals) of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s came with clunky “laboratory” keyboards that were often worse than even early typewriters. It made sense – why would you care about touch typing if remote echo and the absence of buffers rendered it impossible? “

Laboratory keyboards” of 20th-century computers The front-end brain and the back-end brain But ergonomic progress can be uneven. Only a decade later, in the 1970s, things would change dramatically. As computers became smaller and faster and increasingly less remote, and equipped with echos and buffers, their keyboards needed to get better, too. They started stealing many lessons from the best typewriters before them and, unencumbered by mechanical typebars, became a lot more ergonomic than typewriters ever could – which, in turn, allowed for the fingers of the operators to move really, really fast. And the mechanical advantage was joined by a geographic one. If your computer is now just a few inches away from your keyboard – or literally hiding inside it – local echo and buffers become historical curiosity, right? Not quite, as smaller computers were also much slower than the large ones. Moreover, now it wasn’t just keys and typing that needed to feel fast. Keys on the keyboard are nothing more than buttons. In the 1970s and 1980s, computer screens became equipped with buttons, too – first operated by keyboards with newly-invented arrow keys, then by mouse. The old concepts became relevant again. Try pressing these buttons that do not react “in finger time,” and see how unpleasant it feels: Slow magnet poetry Press buttons to create magnet poetry Mouse event latency Button processing time Busy Reset Learning from the past, we can imagine adding buffering here. This is useful, but only to a point. The actions might be buffered and processed as fast as possible, but the mouse events will also have to wait in line. So even a computer that’s plenty fast to draw a different button state instantly when your mouse is on top of it or when you press it, won’t be allowed to do so until the buffer is exhausted: Buffered magnet poetry Press buttons to create magnet poetry. Try to press them as quickly as you can! Mouse event latency Button processing time Buffers in use Busy Reset This still feels awful. A dirty, sticky button in real life would already feel unpleasant. Here, a button feels dirty and sticky in a profoundly alien way, without real-life’s haptic signals that allow your brain to understand what’s going on. Physically locking keys in the typewriters of yore felt bad.