Copy/Paste Keyboard Meant As April Fools’ Joke Is Now Real After Popular Demand
Image via Drop
While most people have been turning to tech solutions that require no coding experience, the programming community has been sniggering away, because you apparently only need to know two things to survive: how to copy and how to paste.
It’s become such a force of habit that programming Q&A site Stack Overflow made it the basis for its prank on April Fools’ Day this year. Inspired by the impulse to replicate already-solved solutions wholesale, the website envisioned ‘The Key’: a compact, ultra-portable keyboard that only contained the copy and paste commands.
Any attempt to copy a code that day would trigger a popup message telling users that they’d have to purchase ‘The Key’ before regaining free access to the platform.
The April Fools’ joke was backed with some statistics: “One out of every four users who visit a Stack Overflow question copies something within five minutes of hitting the page. That adds up to 40,623,987 copies across 7,305,042 posts and comments between March 26 and April 9.”
Surprisingly, or not—given how normal it has become to copy and paste work that isn’t your own on the internet—users were all for buying the mini keyboard, so Stack Overflow decided to Ctrl+V this idea into motion. It reached out to mechanical keyboard enthusiast Cassidy Williams to design the keycaps, and custom keyboard startup Drop materialized the idea.
Image via Drop
Reiterating Stack Overflow’s stance about copying and pasting, the company’s director of content Ben Popper declared in the keyboard’s announcement: “Good artists copy, great artists steal, but [the] greatest artists copy, then paste.”
If this sounds like your type (pun intended) of product so far, you’d be glad to know that a portion of proceeds made from the keyboard, priced at US$29, will be donated to nonprofit Digitalundivided, which aims to help propel female Black and Latinx talents into successful tech entrepreneurship careers. The macropad is open for preorders on Drop.
Image via Drop
[via CNET, images via Drop]
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