The day Return became Enter (2023)

Summary

Marcin Wichary December 2023 / 3,100 words / 35 photos Originally published as a booklet accompanying Shift Happens The day Return became Enter In the popular imagination, the transition from the world of typewriters to the universe of computers was orderly and simple: at some point in the 20th century, someone attached a CPU and a screen to a typewriter, and that turned it into a computer. But the reality is much more fascinating and convoluted. The transition was meandering and lengthy, and traces of its many battles and decisions remain scattered across keyboards today. And no key might better represent the complexity of that journey than the Return key. Return and Enter keys on a AT&T keyboard, and a carriage return on a typewriter An assembly line of typewriters under construction at the Underwood plant in 1962, with the carriage return levers clearly visible Typewriters, born in the 1870s, did not understand information, and didn’t care about the meaning of their output. Early models lacked 0 and 1 keys for cost cutting reasons. You were supposed to type a capital O or a lowercase l instead – they looked just about good enough. Teachers and tutorials encouraged you to overprint to create missing characters: type I on top of S to get a dollar sign, for example, or even reach for a pencil to fill in a missing part if overtyping wasn’t good enough. In theory, you could go even further: nothing prevented you from grabbing a typewritten page, putting it back upside down, and typing on top of what you wrote before. In that universe, a carriage return – that distinctive lever on the left-hand side of each typewriter – was a kind of mechanical shorthand. It advanced the paper by a line or two, and returned the carriage to the left margin, winding it for the next line. You could carry out those two functions separately, but even early typewriter manufacturers realized the operation needed a better, joint interface. An evolution of the carriage return lever: from 1901 t...