The Top 40

I don't know what this electronic beast is, but I have a similar story. I remember using a Telex machine to generate a punched paper tape to send daily sales figures to company headquarters. This, believe it or not, was in 1984, long after real computers had become reasonably common in mid-sized businesses like the one I was working for. (No wonder the company folded in the early 90s). Lileks is right about the finger strength required. Spend an hour on the Telex and your forearms would look like Popeye's for a time.

One of the reasons for Steinway pianos' success is that their keys are noticeably harder than other brands (like my KKawai's, which are more sensitive). The serious pianist is able to modulate the loudness better with the harder key.

The rest of us hobbyists are happy with a softer key.

Strong fingers from that electric keyboard? The manual typewriters of my youth required a running start at the beast just to crank 'em up. To make multiple copies required carbon paper between each sheet, so a four-copy letter required seven sheets through which you must generate enough mechanical force to make a visible letter on page seven. There was no "correction fluid", so a mistake on the last line required the entire page be started over. Perfection has been lost with backspace, delete, cut & paste, copy-paste. You're all a bunch of weak-fingered Sally's. The "good old days" really sucked, hard.

No electric keyboard requires finger strength. What you might have thought you were referring to is an ancient manual keyboard. The kind of typewriter (what's that?) keyboard before the things were electrified. I remember my high school typing teacher -- yes, there were entire year-long school courses teaching typing and business practices related to documents management -- asking who in the class played the piano, then when we clueless admitted to playing the piano, he informed us that he expected us to be the top ranking students in the class -- all because of the finger strength. So those electronic doodads in the photo are cool, but not what you said.

I don't know about the machine in the photo, but the Telex machine I mentioned still required a certain amount of strength to use. Once you depressed a key far enough, it would "break", like a trigger on a gun, and electricity would take over, but the springs under the keys had considerable resistance. The keys were also widely-spaced and had a good deal of travel, so your hands and forearms definitely got a workout.