Comment by irishcoffee
15 hours ago
Carriage return and line feed go way back. Tty stands for teletype. A computer was the job description of a person.
It’s turtles all the way down.
15 hours ago
Carriage return and line feed go way back. Tty stands for teletype. A computer was the job description of a person.
It’s turtles all the way down.
What lower turtles were there? My impression was that teletypes were the first proper keyboard-based interfaces.
Mechanical typewriters have different physical mechanisms to feed forward a line or make the carriage return. I think it doesn't turtle much further back than that.
The telegraph was keybased - only one key so I can't call it a keyboard, but in other ways it is what you are asking about.
Pianos have keys. And some telegraphs were outfitted with piano-like keyboards with one key per letter. Wikipedia has some pictures in the printing telegraph article [1]. So there is arguably a clear lineage from pianos to the modern computer keyboard.
Pianos however don't really have a concept of advancing the line or sending a recorded message.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_telegraph