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Touchtone vs Calculator...why the different layout?

Started by Nick in Manitou, June 14, 2015, 05:42:32 PM

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Nick in Manitou

This may have been covered someplace else on the forum, but I was not sure how to find it.

It seems to me that it would have been natural for the telephone key pad and calculators/adding machine keys to be laid out in a similar fashion - but they are not.

Calculators and their older family members (in my limited experience) are laid out with the lower numbers at the bottom.  The telephone touch pad is set up with the lower numbers at the top.

Could this have been an arbitrary choice, or was there a reason for this?

I have to admit that I have been wanting to ask this question for decades!

Thanks,
Nick

G-Man

It has been well covered on many telephone collecting lists and I believe the relevant Bell Labs document explaining their decision for the present dtmf dial-pad layout is in the TCI Library.


jsowers

Many calculators in the early 1960s didn't have a 10-key interface. Does anyone remember the Friden or Burroughs calculators with the rows and rows of keys? They were huge. If you ever look at the Jack Lemmon movie "The Apartment" from 1960 you will see him using one of those things in the office. They had a carriage that moved back and forth and the music went with the movement of the carriage.

I remember back in 1984 when I worked part-time in a school system central office, they replaced their rotary keysets with a touch-tone phone system and the finance department ladies had a hard time. They could fly on the calculator and they got lots of wrong numbers before they realized they were dialing the phone using the calculator number arrangement by habit.
Jonathan

TelePlay

Quote from: jsowers on June 14, 2015, 07:56:27 PM
Many calculators in the early 1960s didn't have a 10-key interface. Does anyone remember the Friden or Burroughs calculators with the rows and rows of keys? They were huge.

And they had a cash register type arm to pull down and register the keys once pushed, right? And they came in different sizes, number of rows from 0-9 depending on the business needs. I've seen them used in the 50s IIRC.

Found two currently on eBay. Note, no zero in the columns. I guess not pushing a number in a column registered as a zero.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Burroughs-Manual-Calculator-Adding-Machine-1930s-/271895663209
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Burroughs-Manual-Calculator-Adding-Machine-1930s-/331579450805

Never had one but I still have my slide rule, the only thing that NASA used to put a man on the moon in the 60s.

TelePlay


jsowers

Quote from: TelePlay on June 14, 2015, 08:07:50 PM
And they had a cash register type arm to pull down and register the keys once pushed, right? And they came in different sizes, number of rows from 0-9 depending on the business needs. I've seen them used in the 50s IIRC.

There was no arm on the electric models that had about ten rows of keys. Once you pressed + or - or x it would fly into motion and the carriage would go left and right and the wheels would turn and eventually you would have a total appear within the carriage. It had quite a rhythm to it and it made lots of noise. Louder than a typewriter. I attached a pic of a Friden like what I'm trying to describe. Now that I look online, it wasn't a Burroughs I was remembering. It was a Monroe. I remember using a Monroe-Matic from my dad's office that worked very similarly to the Friden. The keys were very small.
Jonathan

TelePlay

We had one of those in my high school typing class. I remember the best spinning. Seems it went on for some time before coming up with a result. Mechanical engineering at its best. Took typing. Best thing I ever did not even having the faintest clue that computers were just 20 years away.

andre_janew

I took typing as well.  My teachers had trouble reading my handwriting.  Is it just me or does the computer keyboard look an awful like the one on an electric typewriter?

Nick in Manitou

Thanks G-Man!  I have not read the document yet, but I have downloaded it and hope to read it later this evening.  It looks as though it will explain the reason pretty well!

I worked for a small radio broadcast equipment manufacturing company in the 1970s and we had a few of the old manual adding machines that had a tape output.  We used those devices to keep track of our inventory.  I can still hear the sound of the keys being punched and the handle being pulled.  Everyone was pretty excited when the boss went and splurged on a new TI electronic calculator!

TelePlay

Quote from: andre_janew on June 14, 2015, 09:49:53 PM
I took typing as well.  My teachers had trouble reading my handwriting.  Is it just me or does the computer keyboard look an awful like the one on an electric typewriter?

They are both QWERTY arrangements.

paul-f

#11
While there are mechanical calculators with many forms of data entry, we should be comparing a touch tone dial with a keyboard that has 10 numberic keys, not rows.
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paul-f

Computer Card Punch Keyboards had a numeric key layout that was closer, but with the 0 key on top.
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paul-f

The AT&T PR Department must have had lots of folks ask the same question, as they put out a formal press release in April 1966 titled:

     ADDING MACHINE ARRANGEMENT FOR TOUCH-TONE BUTTONS?
                                         -- IT DOESN'T ADD UP

It makes the point that adding machines don't have groups of alphabetic letters on the keys, as telephone keys do.  If the top button row on the phone is  7, 8, 9, then the letter groupinge are:

   PRS     TUV    WXY
    7       8      9

   GHI     JKL    MNO
    4       5      6

           ABC    DEF
    1       2      3

           OPER
            0

Who wants to read the alphabet in that order?

They cited market research and confirming human factors testing that was conducted before the 1959 field trials.

At the time of the press release, it was noted that the use of computer card processing machines was increasing and that there were already well over 665,000 touch tone phones in service.  Experience showed that dialing time was about twice as fast as rotary dialing.

Case Closed.
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TelePlay

Quote from: paul-f on June 14, 2015, 11:34:19 PM
ADDING MACHINE ARRANGEMENT FOR TOUCH-TONE BUTTONS?                                         -- IT DOESN'T ADD UP[/b

Nope. But it does for accountants. Those who do accounting type data entry well are fantastic to watch. The 4 fingers are used for numbers and entry buttons while the thumb is only used for the "0." Those who know a calculator number pad well can enter an amazing volume of information just scanning a sheet and never looking at the number pad. I think the thumb for "0" is very similar to the thumb on the space bar of computer keyboards. But, the layout for phone keypads is most likely the result of millions of dollars of research over many months of work, something done by most manufacturers when designing products (except WE did it better than anyone else and had the money to do so). At least that's the way I see it.