The origin of The Key? A joke
Most of the things that man has created throughout history have arisen out of necessity. For example, the clearest of all is the wheel. This was invented with the idea of facilitating the action of transporting things from one place to another with greater ease.
Of course, it is not necessary to go so far back to have more example. Many technological devices that coexist among us today also cover a need, no matter how simple or absurd it may even seem.
Yes, The Key It could be said that it is one of those products that did not need to be created, although its origin is somewhat curious because born from an april fools day joke. And it is that Stack Overflow published and sent a series of messages to its users where they were told that the service would begin to limit the number of times it could be copied and pasted.
Of course, a limitation of this type in a service with that one was strange, but it could be understood by thinking that it could be a way to monetize and hence to eliminate the limitation they were told that they would have to buy The Key.
The Key was a keyboard with only three keys that allowed to bypass the restriction of copy and paste. The user bought it, connected to his computer and that’s it. To use the service in a normal way.
Of course, this was all an April Fool’s joke, but those behind Stack Overflow had no idea what would happen next. Its users complained and felt dependent on the fact that the product was not real. Yes, The Key had liked it and they wanted it to be a reality.
So the company, seeing everything that was assembled, decided to ally with the manufacturer Drop. Together with him they created the real The Key, a keyboard with only three keys sober design that connects via USB C to the computer and costs $ 29.
So if you are interested for whatever reason, you can buy a The Key Macropad from Drop’s own online store.
Anything else to copy and paste?
The keyboard is still something very curious, but it is true that spend $ 29 in a product that only allows copying and pasting it doesn’t seem like a good deal. It is true that there is a third button, the one with the Stack Overflow logo, but it is not clear what its function is. It may or may not be used to launch the web, we will find out.
However, the keyboard does not differ from another conventional keyboard beyond the number of available keys. That means that you can really rap each key to do a specific action and not the default copy and paste ones.
So, if it attracts your attention for aesthetics, you can get one and use its three keys for actions that you usually perform. For example, accept or hang up video calls or launch certain actions when you stream on Twitch as you would with elgato’s Stream Deck.
