Was there a keyboard layout starting with "TBSY"?

Question

Watching an episode of Murder, She Wrote (7x12 "Suspicion of Murder") and, at one point, a character picks up a typewriter and throws it through a window.

However, said keyboard has the strangest layout, and I wonder if anyone can identify it and/or why it might be preferred over the usual US QWERTY layout.

From what I can make out, the layout is:

T B S Y O A M R N L W

   P H U C K Q V J F E D

      Z I G . . . . X . .

(I can't quite make out the punctuation in the bottom row.)

I can't find an equivalent layout or, at least, my Google-fu is letting me down. Besides the potential comedy-value of the first few middle-row keys, is there anything else of note?

Answer 1

I've researched keyboards and character sets on two occasions (*1) and seen a lot of different layouts, from alternate roots like Blickensderfer, Sholes and Dvorak to national variants like Cyrillic JCUKEN, Turkish F, Portuguese HCESAR and French BÉPO, but I can not remember any starting with TBSY.

So while it's not impossible that such existed, I would doubt it and rather believe the typewriter was thrown out the window (*2) several times until the take was right, which may have resulted in key caps coming off and being put back without caring for their original position ... considering some helper doing that over and over, the second line might be a statement of mood :)

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*1 - First time was in the late 1990s when designing a universal character set transcoder; second time just 3 years ago when doing a little project to adapt modern keyboards to classic style kits. While the former included research for all commonly used characters in European (Latin, Greek and Cyrillic based) scripts, the latter was focused on layout - including weird home computer ones. :))

*2 - Being thrown out a window in the Film industry usually means it drops down on the other side of the backdrop, not the 10 stories shown. :)

Answer 2

Well, it's very much a Smith and Corona model. For example, here's an image of the SCM-250 from the mid-sixties, with near-identical physical layout and characteristics:

Of course, you'll notice immediately that it has (almost) the familiar QWERTY layout rather than the one shown in your image. There's a few possible Easter eggs in your layout, such as PHUCK, or JF (Jessica Fletcher), but this may just be the normal pattern recognition powers kicking in, the same ones that see rabbits in clouds.

That layout is a strange one since it would most likely have been one of the standard layouts (if using the Latin alphabet, as it does) or using a different alphabet (if it were a non-standard layout). By the way, since you've accounted for all the English letters, the ones you can't make out on the bottom row are almost certainly punctuation (other than X, they seem to be in two distinct groups).

However, if the one on the show had been a prop for any decent amount of time in its 25-year lifespan, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it had required being put back together quite a few times, especially if it's the sort of thing writers liked subjecting to defenestration :-)

Answer 3

I think it's a fake typewriter made from lightweight plastic foam plus some keys, casing parts, etc. from a SCM portable.

Did you ever try to throw a typewriter? Hurling a heavy real typewriter around would certainly interfere with the actor reading his lines properly. Each take would be worse than the last, not better. If his aim was off, the practical window could be damaged. The landing pad be abused by the sharp edges. Somebody could get hurt.

Of course the flimsy prop typewriter might get knocked apart and hurriedly stuck back together every time, leading (as Raffzahn says) to some creative key reordering by the best boy.