They lead all your life there, but maybe you haven’t even noticed them. There is 3 keys of your keyboard that have a particularity consisting of A rayite relief that appears under the letters F and J and number 5; both in the upper row and on the numerical keyboard on the right, when it is the case. And those stripes have an important utilitywhen typing was considered an important ability to learn and master. Come on, from the writing machines of the last century.
The rayite or relief in the F, J and 5 of the keyboards have the function of Facilitate tact writing: It serves as a guide for index fingers They are properly positioned without looking at the keyboard; And with them, everyone else. This method of typing is based on the muscle memory and in one fixed position of the fingers on each row of the keyboard to write them all and without loud.
In traditional typing, the fingers are placed in the call ‘Base row’ or ‘Start Row’that corresponds, on a Spanish keyboard, to the keys ASDF For the left hand and JKL Ñ For the right. So, The indices must be located on the F keys, in the first case, and J, in the second. These little stripes or reliefs allow the user Find these keys for touchfacilitating a quick and precise writing without having to take the view of the screen, today, or paper, years ago.
The brand on key 5 fulfills a similar function for those who use the independent numerical keyboard with the right hand, facilitating the middle finger being correctly on the 5which is the reference position.
This design is present In practically all physical keyboards (Qwerty, Qwertz, Azerty, etc.) and is a widely adopted ergonomic standard.
Where do the Rayitas from the F, J and 5 keys come from?
Sometimes its introduction to June E. Botichby a 2002 patent in which he proposed to modify certain keys ‘To instill a touch sensation to the person who writes’. But the keys chosen by Botich were A and the point and coma. And the way of highlighting them is not the stripes, but ‘External edges in relief’. Rayita comes from much further back.
There is no unique patent or an inventor clearly attributed to this idea, as with the typewriter that developed throughout the nineteenth century in several iterations, but its adoption can be traced to the second half of the twentieth century, in parallel to the rise of typing as a formal discipline.
The first writing machines did not include tactile guides. It was with the Standardization of the writing method to touchdeveloped at the end of the 19th century and popularized in the twentieth century, when it arose The need for a physical guide for fingers that for the second half of the century it was already a standard in this type of devices.
As for computers, IBM It was one of the first companies to incorporate these brands on their mechanical keyboards during the decades of 1970 and 1980especially with the models IBM Model f and then the IBM Model m (1984), which already clearly included the brands in F and J. since then, practically all keyboards manufacturers adopted this characteristic as standard.