The Noble Backtick
This is the tale of a lonely little key on your keyboard. A key that was once important, trusted with the essential function of bringing the world together and making communication between those who spoke English, and those of every other language in the world together. A key that has been abandoned by most of the world (except for small groups of nerds sitting in dark rooms, with their screens set to dark mode, avoiding light and human contact as much as possible) and forgotten. This is the story of the Backtick key.
A Bit of History
To understand our keyboards, we must understand the history of typing. We live in a generational gap presently, where half of the population remembers typewriters and the other half has likely never seen one – or if they have, it was in a movie or television show. For the younger half, typewriters were mechanical machines that were used to type documents before miniaturized electronics were commonplace. Christopher Latham Sholes is credited with creating the first commercially successful typewriter in 1868. Pressing a key on the keyboard transferred force through a series of levers, which swung little metal arms with the reverse image of letters engraved on them at high speed, almost like little baseball bats. They would impact a small ribbon saturated with ink which was held closely in front of the paper.
Every letter was mounted on its own “bat.” This quickly became an issue as characters were added to the keyboard, as every character added size to the typewriter. To keep things from getting out of hand, some clever tricks were created to allow typists to form new characters by combining two of the ones that were already present. Some of these tricks were clever, like “Overstriking.” Typists would type a character, backspace (which didn’t remove a character like it does on computers!) and type another character to combine it with the first. One of the more common uses of this, was typing the letter “c,” then backspacing, and typing the forward slash (“/”) to create the symbol for “cents.”
Some characters like the umlaut or diacritical marks were made using a key that would perform a half-backspace, which would cause the second character to partially overlap or connect to the earlier character. This technique would have been used to type the Æ symbol, known as “ash.”
The backtick symbol was used with the overstriking technique to add grave marks to letters for the various European languages that used them. The typist would type the letter “o” for instance, press backspace, then press the backtick key, and it would create an accented “ò.”
Present Day
The story of the backtick doesn’t end there though. As computers became more prevalent, the original usage of the backtick waned, as it was easy to directly insert special characters using graphical commands on the screen. Computers also represent each character as a distinct value in binary, not as a combination of characters, which made handling overstriking difficult. Many people today do not even know what the key is for, or why it is still present on modern keyboards. But there is one group of people who still depend on the backtick almost every single day: programmers.
Programmers are often thought of as people who write esoteric codes that make computers do things. While true, programmers also spend a great deal of time communicating with users, with the computer acting as their intermediary – and people still use spoken language to communicate. In programming, human text it referred to as “strings.” Technically strings are any collection of characters, but very often they hold readable text. This blog post is stored on a computer as a string. Your e-mails are strings. The instructions in your favorite program are made of strings. The labels under the buttons in those apps are strings. Every text message you send is a string. Strings are everywhere!
Because there are so many ways strings get used, programmers need specialized strings to deal with different uses. Some strings are made to be short and easy to search and sort. Some strings are meant to hold lots of text efficiently. Still others are templates that get other strings inserted into them to create a new, third string that is customized. Keeping all those strings recognizable, and explaining to the computer what kind of string a programmer wants, is where those backticks come in.
Some strings get single quotes. Some strings get double quotes. Strings that are templates in several programming languages get backticks as quotes. When a programmer reads code, they are likely to see strings “that look like this,” or ‘like this.’ If they are writing a code that should say hello to the person that is logged in (like on your favorite website), the programmer likely sees something like this: `Hello {userName}! `
The backtick tells the computer to look for placeholders (shown by the curly brackets) to replace them with a different string, which holds your name. This is how programmers provide a dynamic, customized experience to visitors.
An Unsung Legacy
The backtick has served different purposes during different periods, but I hope you are convinced that it is still serving an essential function that makes computers more personal, and more enjoyable to use. The Internet especially would be quite a different place, without the noble backtick.
Now, if you ever see someone pondering why that key is still taking up room their keyboard, you can tell them the key role it plays in history, and the critical role it still plays to this very day in making computer programs more powerful.
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash