I was clearing out some old office equipment today and came across my old [circa 1980] Desk Top 2500 "Touch Tone" telephone. It reminded me that the keypad layout, that is still used today on the iPhone, was standardized when the dual-tone multi-frequency system in the new push-button telephone was introduced in the 1960s. The keypad gradually replaced the rotary dial. To anyone like myself who worked in a business office between the mid-60's to the mid-90's, this phone was as commonplace as TI Calculators. And that is what got me thinking about the hidden value of the knowledge embedded in that keypad. I happen to have a desk size electronic calculator sitting right next to my headset telephone in my modern home office. They have been there for the past 5 years yet I never noticed that the keypad layout on the telephone is upside down compared to the calculator keypad.
That piqued my curiosity so I consulted Wikipedia. Here is what I discovered...
The Desk Top 2500 like most other phones of that era was designed by Donald Genaro from Henry Dreyfuss
Associates. Much like Steve Jobs, Genaro felt having user acceptance of his design counted more than mere functionality. This placed him at odds with the engineers on how the keypad should be set up. Calculators had preceded the telephone in the use of a "bottoms up" layout. It had a buy-in from accountants and engineers who used calculators. However, only a small percentage of telephone users had calculators at that time. For
this reason, he felt, they were likely to read keypad numbers like
reading a book: left to right; top to bottom. Genaro faced a lot of resistance to "top down" layout but insisted it was better suited for the dialing than the calculator layout. To prove his point a great deal of user testing was conducted before the decision to have the number "1" placed in the upper
left corner of the touchpad was approved. That is a hidden value we take for granted today because PCs have long since replaced hand held calculators. And who would have thought that having the letters on the touchpad follow the the same top down pattern as the numbers would enable texting while driving. But that is a hidden value for another day...
Pick 102 - Generation Alpha
Screen technologies are the base of everything that characterizes Generation Alpha and truly distinguishes them from every other generati...
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