After ~100 hours on press
over 1 year ago – Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 03:57:27 PM

I am writing this at the airport, waiting for my flight back home. I’m tired after eight days of 12+ hour shifts, but we printed all of the volumes 1, 2, and 3, including their respective covers. We also folded some of it already, and solved a bunch of very tricky challenges along the way.

The few remaining things: folding and binding it all, printing the slipcases, and some of the finishing work. I also have to design and lay out the booklet, but I feel/hope that should be easy with all the lessons we’ve all learned over the last week and a half.

As before, here are some quick snapshots, and you can head over to Mastodon to learn more. I hope to write more about the process and what I’ve learned, but this will take a while.

On press!
over 1 year ago – Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 04:55:56 AM

We are in the middle of printing! I just approved the last set of pages from volume 2 and we have just began printing the first volume. Concurrently, volume 3 is running on another press.

This is a short update because the days are very busy, with 12–14 hours each day verifying and adjusting the prints. I will write more in a few weeks, but if you are interested in some unfiltered day-by-day updates, I am posting a lot of photos and videos on Mastodon. 

And here are a few photos, too:

Ctrl+Alt+Shift Happens keycap update!
over 1 year ago – Sat, Jul 01, 2023 at 10:07:41 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Who gets to decide what’s “overkill,” anyway
over 1 year ago – Sat, Jul 01, 2023 at 09:03:39 AM

TL; DR

We are still on track for an October delivery. The third volume and the index are finished and typeset, the cover too, the Gorton font is in advanced progress, we’re almost done with fixes and fine-tuning printing details, and I’m flying to Maine to oversee printing in just a week.

These are exactly 50 words of an update. If you want to keep reading, here’s 2,400 more.

 My first-ever keyboard emergency 

At some point a few weeks ago, my indexer pointed out that one of the sentences she went through didn’t feel quite right. While this is very close to printing, some changes are still possible, so I took a look.

This was in a chapter about the evolution of Model F into Model M, with the diversion into the unholy territory of IBM’s PCjr. The sentence was an easy rewrite. But then I quickly took a peek at the image on the same page, to make sure it matched what I was talking exactly.

It didn’t.

This was unexpected. I placed this image in the book long time ago, thanks to generosity of one keyboard seller. It was supposed to show a typical PC/AT keyboard from 1984, the one with the famous big-ass Enter.

But on the photo, the big-ass Enter was nowhere to be found: 

It seemed like the photo showed a less common PC/AT variant with a more traditional flat Enter, something I didn’t realize because I didn’t even know this variant of the keyboard existed!

Now I had a problem. This was already past some deadlines, and I was flying on a business trip by the end of the week. Photoshop wasn’t enough to make the photo look like a typical PC/AT – at least not in my hands. Maybe there was another good photo of that keyboard on the web I could use or buy? Nope. An hour of searching yielded nothing.

I had a true keyboard emergency on my hands. But in situations like these, there is always eBay. This time, there were two search results. One was really expensive… and also Norwegian. This wouldn’t do – while in other places in the book I treasured keyboards from outside America, here that would be confusing.

Luckily, the only other eBay PC/AT keyboard was available to purchase immediately, and it could arrive within three days. But there was a reason eBay showed it second – it was the most expensive keyboard I would have ever bought.

But I had to get it. The keyboard arrived the day before my flight, I put it in the lightbox, played with some Lightroom sliders, and got a matching photo out of it:

I laughed realizing that I have never had a keyboard emergency before. It's possible that I have also never paid extra just to get something more mundane (having a Norwegian Model F would’ve been really cool!).

A bonus? At least for the price, the keyboard came with a bunch of converters – DIN to PS/2, PS/2 to USB-A, USB-A to USB-C – so I could actually put it to use. As a matter of fact, I am typing on it now, my neighbors and my cat be damned (it’s Model F, ergo clicky enough to wake up the ghost of Thomas Watson Jr.).

And, when I connected it to my Mac, it threw this old dialog box at me:  

This made me chuckle again. Today, the very Enter that I needed for the photo doesn’t show up as any of the options, and that was exactly the whole point of the chapter, titled “The tragic fable of the gray big-ass Enter.” I thought I could write that story without owning one – but, at the last minute, an overpriced and forgotten gray big-ass Enter came into my life anyway.

 This isn’t what they meant by “remote work,” I don’t think 

I have received print tests for all the volumes, and the printer and myself found almost two hundred small changes to be made. 

In the recent issue of the newsletter, I wrote about various to-do lists created for the book. If you like reading about the creative process, be sure to check it out! This is the new to-do list that spawned since that time:

Why is it so weird, with emoji and bolding and crossed out text? This is because now the printer has the custody of the files, and I cannot make the changes myself. I have to send the printer a recipe on how to make these changes on their end, then verify their results, then send changes for results that were not satisfactory… It’s complicated.

The recipe is kind of like an artisanal diff:

Luckily we are very, very close. I expect this part to be done very soon.

Exactly 2% of saturation at exactly 255 degrees of hue

Remember last time when we were discussing shades of orange? Well, these weeks I’m talking about shades of… black and white.

The same chapter talking about the big-ass Enter covers beige computers and how different brands chose different hues of off-white depending on their needs: American manufacturers typically went for a hint of brown, European manufacturers preferred “cool gray,” Sony was neutral, and Apple started with a green tint, only to shift toward something warmer to make their computers feel more approachable.

But only now I start to understand what they were going through.

Since the book’s primary color is orange, I wanted to tint the black-and-white towards coolness, to avoid to much of that sepia feel. The book’s secondary color is dark violet, and so I went in that direction.

But little did I know that in the printing process, the universes of black-and-white and color are almost entirely separate. I am still learning what it means exactly: it seems related to the fact that K lives right next to C, M, and Y, maybe, but doesn’t quite talk to them. I will report back next time.

What it means in practice is tons and tons of printing tests to get things right. These are literally 2% saturation differences, but it’s not color homeopathy: you can see the difference.

And the dependencies are tricky. Tinted black-and-white photos have to match tinted black-and-white photos with colors and those have to match color photos with tinted backgrounds. I’ve been looking at slightly off-gray shades of gray so much that my cones and my rods are going through collective identity crises. I’ve become deeply aware of sunset and sunrise times because you can’t review these without daylight. It’s been a lot.

Even during last week’s business trip, this is what my hotel room bed looked like, once again:

And the floor of my apartment right now is not much better:

I have always thought screen colors were supposed to be additive (adding to black), and paper’s subtractive (removing from white). But here’s a test print of only the CMY colors being added to black, which is a new discovery: 

This part is hard. Surprisingly hard. Please, wish me some luck. I want even color-less surfaces will to have their colors finely tuned, but we are limited on time.

Two entries for “zombie,” if you are curious

On the other side, I am very happy with the index, which is all done and locked in. I think it will be a great resource. The indexer – Jan Wright – did a fantastic job, slicing through the book and seeing it in ways I never did, and keeping the index lightweight when it could be, but serious in other places that deserved it. I didn’t know an index could have a personality. This one does, and it matches the book really well.

As a reminder, the 56 pages of the index will be printed in the third volume, and also available online. I cut new compressed Gorton digits just for this occasion…

…came up with a few new icons to match the style of the rest of the book, and took 27 new photos of keys just for this, which also made for a fun visual:

Here’s a… fact related to this. (Is it fun? I’m not sure.) I took photos of these keys like I do all my photos – with my very nice, rather professional camera:

These photos are good enough so each one could be blown up to a size of a poster. You could see the texture, the manufacturing imperfections or marks, sometimes even small fingernail indents:

But in the index these keys will be printed tiny, smaller than the size of a fingertip. I’m led to believe that they will look great using the nice printing process with tiny dots, but a lot of this detail is overkill: In the book where it’s sometimes hard to find a good quality at even 300 dpi, I found it amusing where InDesign reported that the effective dot-per-inch resolution was over four thousand. I have never in my life seen this go nearly as high!

 The printing test of a printing test and an Easter egg inside Easter eggs

The entire volume 3 has been finished and delivered, too. The remaining 100+ full-color pages not taken up by the index will be a combination of “artifacts of progress”: some photos I haven’t shared before (including various typing experiments like the PC/AT above), early drafts of some chapters, “making of” writing, and keyboards that I couldn’t find room for in the two volumes, but which are otherwise interesting.

I feel happy about this, too – I have always wanted to see what a “making of” featurette would look for a book rather than a movie – and putting it together made me surprisingly nostalgic and emotional. I think you’ll like it, too.

Here is a print test of the part of volume 3 that talks about print tests: 

(There is also a fun Easter egg, located… on the page listing all Easter eggs. Not kidding!)

 Just sit down at a typewriter and bleed

These have been weeks filled with printing jargon. My test prints are called “bluelines,” because back in the day test prints were actually blue (see also: blueprints). As you might have spotted above, you “open up” a photo to make it brighter, because back in the days of phototypesetting, everything was photographed, and you open a lens to let more light in (see also: shooting wide open).

And bleeding? In the audio world it stands for accidental pick-up. In building, bleeding is densification of concrete. Here, in printing, it means: If you want your image to go all the way to the edge, you need to provide a little extra to go “beyond” the edge. The reason is simple – there is always a small natural imperfection in positioning when printing and trimming. Imagine the trimming shifting by 1mm:

You’d see a strange 1mm white line of paper, which wouldn’t be great!

It’s better to provide bleed – extra information on either side that would accommodate some imprecision:

I learned recently that this gets even more demanding when printing the cover. It’s not just small imperfections. The cover needs to wrap around to the other side, where the endpapers are glued on top of it.

A typical recommendation for bleed on printed pages is 3–5mm. For cover, it’s a whopping 22mm – very close to an inch! 

The challenge now, of course, is: where do all these extra millimeters come from?

Let’s grab one of the cover images for my book, a well-composed photo of the mythical “laser eraser”:

If you extend it naïvely to wrap around, you lose a lot of that photo to that wrap – when you look at the front, the composition is shot, some of the details are gone, and the sharpness goes away: 

You can anticipate that when taking photos, in a similar way to how videographers frame with extra pixels on the edges that can later be swallowed by software image stabilization. But it was too late for this – this photo was already taken, long ago.

You can also extend the photo by outpainting it by hand, which works really well for simple scenes. But here tons of stuff was happening on every edge. Making up the pixels by extending each surface by hand would take hours…

…so yes, I used AI. All the new machine learning algorithms throw a wrinkle into the long-known adage: now, you can literally get new information from nothing. I extended the canvas, asked Photoshop to do its best, and it worked well enough for something no one, in practice, will actually see: 

Yeah, I did it with unease. The ethics of AI are murky. Nothing comes from nothing; the AI imagines pixels not out of thin air, but based on prior work of the often unpaid artists and photographers.

At least here, Adobe lists their sources and they seem legitimate. And what felt most important: using AI here was not about showcasing the fake, synthesized work. All the extensions were delegated to the periphery, to the wrap that no one will ever look at. The extra pixels allow the original photos to fully shine.

 A Gorton like this has never existed before

The reinvention of the Gorton font was one of the popular Kickstarter rewards, and the type designer I hired – Inga Plönnings – finished her work on the first iteration of the font. 

It’s really great to see Gorton as a variable font, with a rich set of diacritics, and – something extra we both decided to do that goes beyond what was promised in the stretch goal – a full set of lowercase characters!

We are working together on fine-tuning some of the details, including making sure Gorton in this iteration is not losing too much of its strange personality.

What’s next?

Phew, right? I’ve actually skipped a bunch of smaller things because this is already very, very long.

But the real fun is just ahead. (Is it going to be fun? I’m, again, not sure.)  Next week, I’m actually flying in to Maine to oversee printing! I’ve been promised days of 12-hour shifts among whirling machinery that will bring my book to life.

We’re going to start with the black-and-white pages to make sure we get them right. There might be bleeding of at least one kind. I’m not bringing any keyboards with me, but who knows. There’s always eBay.

The smell of the new book is ink, not paper
over 1 year ago – Tue, May 23, 2023 at 08:24:45 PM

TL; DR: Everything is going according to the plan and timelines I shared in the last update!

Here is what’s going on in more detail… and it’s a lot.

Book writing and layout

I’ve delivered the finished volume 1 and 2 to the printer – and I mean “finished” in terms of writing, photos, and layout. The book was so large (over 250GB! over 1,500 files!) that I had to send it as an SSD via the post office. 

With that out of the way for a bit, I am currently working on finalizing the third volume and the booklet.

Book dummies

I’ve received and tested book mock-ups from the bindery. Those mock-ups exist to validate sizing, binding, and the general feel. They are strange because they are completely blank, completely white (apart from the orange accent I chose for what’s called the head and foot bands), and… completely fragrance-free.

What I learned from my editor Glenn is that for fresh books, most of the smell comes from ink. (Only for much, much older books the paper starts to smell, too.) And since these books are not printed, they don’t smell at all.

It’s very strange.

Orange tests

Speaking of orange, we ran a special set of tests just to figure out the perfect hue of that color. I created unique test prints that captured both the typography and some photos, and then, weeks later, inspected them carefully with a loupe.

The designer working on the keycap in Belgium also got a copy, and matched the right orange with his plastics and process: 

The printing process

Even though we were already confident we wanted to go with the stochastic printing process, we also ran some tests with a different (more traditional) process, just to do one extra check and gain confidence.

Stochastic printing is generally much better resolution and fewer strange patterns – it’s sort of like “retina pixels for print.” This will give all the photos a much crisper feel and would allow everyone to inspect fine details. Here’s a comparison:

Indexing

The indexer is far along with indexing the book, and we are figuring out how to typeset the index in parallel. I even resurrected a narrow set of Gorton digits just for this: 

Please don’t tell my indexer I’m sharing this, but here’s a tiny snippet of the index in progress. It’s really fun to see the book reflected in that way and see patterns I haven’t seen before. There are also quite a few jokes (some at my expense, it seems!):

The Gorton font

I hired the type designer to work on finalizing the Gorton font (making it variable, adding accents, and even potentially adding lowercase!) that a lot of you chose as an add-on on Kickstarter. 

We are discussing some of the nuances and big decisions – here below is one of them – and the work on the font just started: 

Store

Many of you might have seen this already, but for the limited time, the book can now also be pre-ordered at shifthappens.site/store. If you have a friend who missed out on Kickstarter, or if you want to buy more copies – please head there!

The last photo update I made before sending the book to the printer

For some reason, I have recently been on a kick of learning about Hungarian technology. I found perhaps the most amazing logo of Orion – a local radioelectronics company: 

I discovered a fantastic site (holdcomputers.com) with beautiful photos of Hungarian microcomputers, and posted a few of those photos on Mastodon. Here’s one that really resonated with people:

And then, independently, I found a new Hungarian photo archive. Within it, there was this amazing 1983 May Day photo:

It’s one of these photos that speak volumes (here’s another example I wrote about before). Within it you can see the rise of home and microcomputers in the 1980s, reflect on the gender imbalance of the the crowd, marvel at the fact that it’s all happening outside, notice the cheap domestic TV used in lieu of a monitor, and bonus: this photo is in Europe, rather than America (most photos of keyboards come from the U.S. and balancing that is important for me personally).

But also… this was neither a computer nor a keyboard I recognized. This doesn’t happen all that often any more, and it’s kind of exciting when it does. I asked some friends about it on Mastodon, and we found some clues, and then we realized the clues themselves were contradicting each other – the machine on a Hungarian photo was from the German computer maker ITT; there is “Schneider” on the screen (another German company, but one that only started distributing UK computers in 1983); the keyboard feels distinctly Siemens-y; people are wearing western t-shirts.

Could it not have been Hungary after all? You can check out all the nooks and crannies of us figuring it out on Mastodon, but the long story medium long: It is Hungary, but this is not actually a computer! “Schneider” – a popular Hungarian name – was a red herring, ITT used Siemens keyboards, and the whole thing might have been a loaner: I now believe this is Bildschirmtext, a more advanced German version of teletext, possibly grabbed from abroad and set up locally just for kids to play with – nothing more than a glorified “TV typewriter” with an overbuilt keyboard.

In the 1980s, we all wanted computers so badly that we’d settle for even this extremely peculiar situation. A few countries over, in Poland, at around the same time, I was one of those kids, dreaming of a western t-shirt and any kind of a computer. It feels nice to be able to include something like that in the book, and squeeze it in just before I sent the drive with the entire, finished book, on its way to Maine.