On seeing a clunky, quirky, sleek or sexy calculator from the 1970s in a museum or in a museum catalogue, surely you would be disappointed not to be able to reach out and touch its eminantly clickable keys. I know I would.
And yet here I am, in a museum workspace, with 436 such calculators at my fingertips, making our database ready to publish a catalogue of the collection. I could help you. I could give you vicarious calculator sensuality.
So, I am not merely recording dates and what type of battery these things took; I have devised a language system.
To try and make it clear, I made a few semi-artificial parameters of the act of pressing these little keys .
First is the length of travel: how far the keys can be depressed. This works out simply as short-, medium-, or long-travel. Texas Instruments are generally very short travel, for example.
Next is the process of depressing the keys. Just like the keys of a piano, those of a calculator can be differently weighted. Degrees of resistance. Thus the keys vary between being very light and very heavy to the touch. Some of them require serious finger power. Some are so light you hardly knew you pressed them, and then some, like the Sinclairs, seem so heavy that perhaps the calculators are only meant ot be viewed. Of course, Sinclair can get away with that: theirs are the only calculators that actually pass as sexy, especially the Sovereign.
During depression, the keys may also be 'squashy'. Casio keys are a typical example of this. Note that lightness to the touch is necessary but not sufficient for squashiness.
Then we come to the behaviour of the keys at the end-point of depression. It became fashionable to make calculators whose keys clicked upon depression in the 1970s (in the marketing blurb this was a 'positive click'... helping you have a positive calculator experience, of course). But there are all manner of types of click: it could be soft, muffled, loud or prominent; it could be dull, bright, flimsy, hollow, metallic, or could even give a faint rattle. Some manufacturers ignored clickiness entirely; their keys, in my language, have 'a soft manner of depression'. Decimo tend to be like this. The phrasing here is a little awkward I know, but it is better than my earlier solution, where the keys simply had 'soft depression'. Poor things.
Finally comes the behaviour of keys on their return. They can be increadibly springy and bouncy on some makes. Surprisingly, springiness seems to be almost entirely unrelated to squashiness. A key that squashes limply on depression can suddenly spring straight back out at you on release: a remarkable feat if ever I saw/felt one.
Shape comes into this as well, but only insofar as some are concavely shaped to the finger.
Throughout all of this I have tried to refrain from normative language. Some calculators have such utterly crap keys that quite frankly I'd prefer to take the calculator to bits and gawk at its groovy interior than actually use the damn thing. (Actually its getting to the point where I want to do this to most of the calculators, invalidating my attempt at abuse, but you get it, I'm trying to be emphatic here: some of their keys suck). And then some calculators, some calculators have dream keys. They really do. I want to use language like 'perfectly' weighted, and ridiculous things like a 'delightful click.' But I try not to talk in those kinds of terms. I'm trying to be objective about this. Ha!
