I’ve been using Kinesis keyboards since 1996, and from the outside, it looks like nothing much has changed since my first one. On the plus side, Kinesis didn’t screw up a good thing. But even better, they’ve made continual improvements over the years to make their current model, the Advantage2, a nearly-perfect mechanical keyboard.
When I first moved to Silicon Valley I worked crazy hours. I loved my job and I needed to prove myself, so I was coding like crazy. That translates to typing like crazy, and it wasn’t long before that caught up with me. This article covers my ensuing experience with ergonomic keyboards and the Dvorak keyboard layout.
Rewind to 1995. I could type pretty fast on a normal keyboard. My touch typing was not textbook proper, but hey, it worked fine for me. I started getting worried when I would go home and I could still feel the tension in my forearms and wrists. I figured that if I was going to be a programmer geek for any decent amount of time, I’d have to fix those problems pronto.
I got to talking to Eric Townsend, a coworker of mine who owned the wackiest keyboard I had ever seen. It was a Kinesis Contoured keyboard. I found myself fascinated enough to drop the $300 (at the time) to get one myself.
I wrote the New Programmer's Survival Manual to help programmers succeed in the industry. Available direct from Pragmatic Bookshelf and Amazon.com, or read more about it here.
