Saturday, February 04, 2017

Datamancer keyboard

For those who had not seen my Datamancer keyboard, here it is. All original parts (keys from an old Remington), and created or designed and hand-made by one person.
All fully functional!
It was created by Richard Nagy.




6 comments:

Monsieur Beep! said...

Cool. Watched a film on ARTE just the other day where in a history play (about Leibniz, if I remember well) they showed the same computer screens and keyboards as in Datamancer. So these things really exist and can be bought, I thought they had just been made up for that play.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Oh they are real. I have one. They are only, naturally, more rare and costly than plastic mass-produced ones.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Was the film wortth watching?
(Title?)

Monsieur Beep! said...

As I´ve been watching TV a lot these days (due to the long winter nights) I cannot recall precisely in what specific TV programme I saw the keyboard.
I think, however, it was in an essay on ARTE about Leibniz who was a great mathematician and who had many more scientific traits.
He was featured in a play sitting in front of vintage computer screens and was typing his ideas into vintage keyboards. By "vintage" I don´t mean those gadgets used in the digital world back in 1990 or so (like early Macintoshs or Commodores), but by "vintage" I mean the time when Leibniz lived; there weren´t any of the modern gadgets at the time, of course. That´s why the producers chose to include all these Datamancer gadgets to give the impression as if they were actually used at the time, with their baroque display frames and baroque keyboards. Like Captain Cook traveling the oceans with a modern GPS at the helm instead of an old-fashioned compass.
Film makers often have a habit of showing the ancient world in the light of our modern times by this sort of "surrealism".

It sure was worth watching, yes. I found it by chance, while zapping through "my" TV channels, which incorporate mostly scientific and documentary channels.

:-)

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

That sounds very cool.

Anonymous said...

Are you a hipster, Eolake? That's a hipster keyboard.