Keyboard: How Does a Computer Understand What I Type? - Trendless Tech: mostly timeless computer facts

Converting the keyboard used for typewriting into a useful computer input may probably be the most convenient thing that has ever happened to computers.

Before keyboards, people had to make holes in punch cards or paper tape to send information to a computer. If you’ve ever taken a standardized test where you fill in the numbers with a pencil, imagine having to code a computer that way.

We still use barcodes (e.g., homogenous retail products) and magnetic ink (e.g., bank checks) that use the older technology (as an aside, barcodes read the light spots on the code, not the dark spots like intuition would have you believe).

Almost everything else has either moved to keyboard-based input or is supplemented with it. Even completely screen-based interfaces (e.g., mobile devices) often use an on-screen keyboard.

Closing Circuits

When you press a key on a keyboard, you’re closing a circuit. That circuit sends an electrical pulse to the CPU with a binary code representing a number. This is reproduced digitally if the keyboard is on a screen.

Interestingly, musical synthesizer keyboards operate similarly. The only difference is that they usually output the signal to a perceptible sound, along with (possibly) sending MIDI information out to a computer.

However, the actual design of a keyboard itself isn’t so simple. Keyboards use an elaborate “keyboard matrix” to map the keys to the signals they’re supposed to send.

The keys themselves are designed to maximize ergonomic convenience and conform to user habit. The conventions were drawn from typewriters, with a vast variety of other strange designs throughout the 1980s. However, the keyboard convention has settled itself into a predictable layout since the 1990s:

A QWERTY layout of 26 characters, plus 8 keys used for punctuation. This was pulled straight from how typewriters worked (which was configured to prevent the hammers of nearby keys from sticking to each other when typing correctly).
A few keys to navigate text: a large Space key at the bottom to advance a space, a Tab key to insert a gap of about 5 spaces, Enter/Return to move to the next line, and Backspace to remove a character.
A row of number keys along the top, with a few mathematical keys next to it, with an alternate configuration of other more specific punctuation symbols.
A panel of 6 keys, with 4 of them being navigation (Home, End, Page Up, Page Down), an Insert key that changes the text mode between insertion and overwriting, and a Delete key that serves as the forward deletion (i.e., the reverse of Backspace).
Navigation/cursor/arrow keys arranged in an inverted-T arrangement that allow directional navigation.
To allow the user to send more information, keyboards have multiple “modes” that allow for capitalized letters (SHIFT key), along with alternate and control key combinations (ALT and CTRL key). To make it convenient, they’re on both sides of the keyboard.
A Print Screen key. At one time, it would actually send the screen’s display to the printer when everything was terminal-based, but now serves to send a screenshot to the clipboard.
A Pause Break key. At one time, it would break a telegraph circuit, and is most reliable to stop a console command. However, it doesn’t have a well-defined purpose anymore.
Proprietary key (Win and CTRL, or ⌘) that add even more functionality and features.
Specific locks to make the user more efficient:
- CAPS LOCK keeps SHIFT key pressed for entering letters.
- SCROLL LOCK is a bit more software-specific (e.g., spreadsheets), but permits the arrow keys to either navigate the screen or their selection.

Further, multiple other features are often on a keyboard, though they’re not required:

Function keys labeled F1 through F12, designed for additional software-based features.
A number pad with all the numbers and mathematical symbols in a 10-key configuration. It can be very useful for math-related needs (e.g., accounting).
- NUM LOCK is a mode that uses the number pad only for entering numbers (rather than navigation).
Other proprietary buttons for features like media playback or task-switching. Many of them can be remapped.
To save space, smaller keyboards may use function keys to make multi-function buttons, often with the alternate function also labeled on the keyboard.

It’s worth noting that all software can be re-mapped. One of the first things worth mapping to another location is the Caps Lock, since it’s in a very convenient place but is rarely used.

There are two major ways that keys connect with their electrical contact:

Membrane keyboards have a bendable rubber dome that pushes down when pressed to activate the connection. This makes a softer-feeling press, but is much cheaper and often more quiet than a mechanical keyboard. Some older membrane keyboards were flat, meaning you couldn’t easily use touch typing with them (instead of sight typing, which is much slower).
Mechanical keyboards have a piece of plastic obstructing a bent piece of memory metal when it’s raised. When depressed, the plastic moves out of the way and makes the connection. That connection can be linear (slides down smoothly), tactile (a small bump it has to go over before it connects), or clicky (a separate piece with a bump that bounces down to make an audible click).

As far as feel and responsiveness, mechanical keyboards are superior. However, their design comes with some downsides. Beyond cost, mechanical keyboard signals have a higher chance of mapping extra keys (also called “ghosting”) when 3 or more keys are pressed, so it often stops those keys (also called “blocking”). Thus, there’s an “n-key rollover” that sets a maximum number of keys to get pressed. This usually doesn’t cause issues for most people, but hardcore software developers and gamers will notice anything below 6-key-rollover.

Occasionally, a keyboard may register multiple inputs with one keyboard press, known as a “key bounce”. There are several “debounce” break-fix methods:

Software debouncing, which involves adding response delays to the controller after the first press.
Dusting out the keys with compressed air, or running it through the dishwasher if the keyboard doesn’t have many expanded features.
Replacing the switch directly, which is typically not worth the cost or trouble on a cheaper keyboard.

Coded Characters

If we count all the upper and lowercase letters, along with special characters like “,” and ?”, we can easily fit them all into 128 numbers. Thus, we can use 7 bits to represent all the basic English letters, with each number corresponding to a certain letter. Check this ASCII “code page” to see an example.

In case you’re wondering why it wasn’t 8 bits, teleprinters used to send text well, but the early microprocessors weren’t always reliable, so that final bit was typically used for parity. Memory wasn’t as reliable as it is today and a 0 or 1 would sometimes swap, so they created an error-checking system with a bit at the end:

Count the number of 1’s in the memory register.
When it’s “even parity”, the parity bit is 1 if the sum is odd, and 0 if it’s even, which makes the sum always even. The bits are the opposite for “odd parity”.
When reading, check if the sum is odd or even, then send it again if it doesn’t match what it should be.

These code pages wasn’t always easy to work with, since they varied on certain details. It’s critically important that you know which code page you’re using, since the wrong conversion will make the data completely useless.

To avoid further headaches, engineers got together and created the ASCII standards to match the same numbers to letters on all the computers. This worked, but only gave 95 characters. See EBCDIC to understand the headaches involved.

Later, they created a universal standard called Unicode, which ambitiously tried to represent every single character for language that humanity has ever made.

UTF-8 is meant to be backwards-compatible with ASCII.
UTF-16 wasn’t and is generally not used as much. The original Unicode standard would have given 65,536 characters, which they imagined would be enough code points, but they needed a few more.
UTF-32 is the current standard for an all-inclusive text format. It’s still being added to, but is presently over 140,000 characters. Until software standards can use 262,145 characters, Unicode only requires 18 bits per character to transfer.
As of the early 2020s, UTF-8 is usually the standard for most websites. The intuition would be that UTF-32 is the best solution, but it often requires multiple “code points” to store the information, so it’s easier to use a smaller UTF format.

To save on data (since a database can frequently be trillions of characters), engineers developed “variable-length” encodings, where the leading bits can communicate how many bits the rest of the text has. The human-readable code point for each character looks like U+0041 U+0052, and doesn’t carry over any graphic design or font selection.

The standards for Unicode are drawn from the history of language, so they are not an exact science. Many of them borrow from prior printmaking conventions, and some characters are imported straight from it without much consideration. Further, some fashions can affect whether some characters become standardized.

In fact, Unicode standards for higher-level text can be messy, and each language will parse it differently. For example, 🤦🏼‍♂️ is accurately defined as 1 character in Swift and Elixir, but 3 characters in Python, 7 in JS/Java/C#, and 17 in Rust.

Further, there are duplicates of some characters, meaning the text is not the same encoding even when it appears the same. As an example, Å and Å are not the same character, since one of them is composed of the Latin A with a combining character and the other is a pre-composed code point.

There are also regional considerations, but unfortunately the region is contained in metadata, which is often lost during transfer, creating further issues.

Since the computer must read the entire memory register to understand what character the text is, any errors are represented as �.

This will probably move around based on the Unicode standard moving as well (new standard every year), meaning the above example may become obsolete by the time you read this.

Graphical Display

Text, however, isn’t simply an abstraction, and must display in some fashion. There are many forms of typography available, and a set of characters that abide by that typographical rule is called a “font”. Each font tends to include other formats as well of the characters, such as bold and italic.

A font is either “monospaced” (where each character is using the same width) or “proportional” (where each character uses differing widths relative to the size of the letter). Monospaced fonts are still used frequently for what is known as “ASCII art”, which uses different characters to portray a minimalist image, and programmers prefer monospaced because it makes it easier to read and debug code.

Moving Information

The keyboard signal sends over to the “keyboard memory map”, a specific spot in memory that shows what keys are pressed.

Since the keyboard memory map is an abstraction, it doesn’t necessarily need a physical keyboard:

Add a keyboard display to a touchscreen user interface.
Use hand or body gestures with a programmed camera to capture letters or words.
Use electrodes attached to the brain to let someone “think” the letters or words.

Not Simple

In general, a keyboard press has many stopping points between the moment that it’s pressed and the moment the CPU registers it. While it’s not really processed at all during that wait, the signal is often locked-off or added to a queue to allow other time-sensitive operating system processes to complete first.

However, computers still run as fast as necessary irrespective of this delay. The only time this ever presents itself as an issue is with specific uses (such as playing high-reflex games). But, if screens draw frames faster than 60 Hz, this may change.

The Future

While some futurists imagine that we may migrate away from text (such as a society that exclusively communicates via voice or videoconferencing), this has proven itself false. Text is very low-data to transfer compared to audio or video, and is easy to search and index. For that reason, text (and by association, keyboards) will always be around in some fashion.

Keyboard interfaces migrated naturally from hardware to software, mostly because habits and rituals are difficult to change. The future of keyboards will be much of the same.

Keyboard interfaces have become more advanced. As of this writing (June 2022), neural implants are now permitting near-accurate typing using thoughts with at least 94% accuracy. It allows people with paralysis and cerebral palsy to communicate, and paves the way for further developments.

However, keyboards must conform to healthy UX standards. Pushing too many trendy changes will invariably alienate most of the users, so it’s likely keyboard conventions will stick around long after nearly everything uses a software-only digital keyboard.