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WTF?! Your full-sized mechanical keyboard with RGB lighting and dedicated macros may be extra, but we bet it doesn’t come close to the “ten hundred computer letter getter.” This monstrosity of a keyboard types entire words instead of individual letters, boasting a staggering 1,020 keys – and yes, it’s just as impractical as it sounds.
Inspired by Randall Munroe’s xkcd comic “Up Goer Five,” where rocket science is explained using only the 1,000 most common English words, YouTuber Attoparsec decided to take the concept one step further. Why stop at explaining rockets when you can build a keyboard that forces you to communicate like a caveman with a thesaurus? The result is a five-panel keyboard sprawling across his massive desk.
Each of the 1,000 keys represents one of the most common English words, arranged alphabetically across the five panels. Naturally, that excludes words like “chrysanthemum,” but some favorites – including curse words – made the cut. To keep things slightly less chaotic, Attoparsec also added 20 modifier keys for pluralizing words or adding suffixes like “-ing” or “-ed.”
The keyboard’s design is a feat of engineering. For one, Attoparsec opted for massive, one-inch-wide keys, though that didn’t prevent some longer words from still being hyphenated. He also used dye-sublimation to print the words onto blank keycaps, a process that sounds simple but actually required months of trial and error. In fact, the entire project took six full months to complete.
Then there’s the sheer physical challenge of using this monstrosity. Attoparsec describes typing on it as a “full-body experience,” which is a polite way of saying you’d need the wingspan of an albatross to comfortably reach from one corner to the other.
Now, you might assume that a keyboard designed to type entire words instead of individual letters would speed up the process. Nope. The reality is quite the opposite. In a typing speed test, Attoparsec managed a painfully slow 13 words per minute – less than one-sixth of his usual 83 on a standard keyboard.
All things considered, it’s safe to say that keyboard layouts aren’t evolving beyond the tried-and-true QWERTY anytime soon. Yet, despite the absurdity of the Ten Hundred Computer Letter Getter, there’s something oddly charming about it. Just look at those endless rows of keys, waiting to be pressed.
Now, we’d have gladly crowned this abomination as the “world’s worst keyboard” but a strong contender already exists. And, of course, it’s from the same YouTuber. Attoparsec previously built the Two-Thirds Keyboard, a bizarre experiment where common letters were given oversized keys, while rarer ones were shrunk down to near-useless sizes.
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