Today is 16 August 2006, and I've launched CAPSoff.

I wrote my first CV on a manual typewriter, used carbon paper to make a copy, and carefully sent it to my prospective employer. The year was 1984 and the CV got me an interview and a job.

We still use the typewriter interface... the qwerty layout, the spacebar, the backspace in the top right corner. Like all interfaces, it's hard to change once it gets a lot of users. Even my mobile phone has a full qwerty keyboard, and I love it.

But there's one thing that's annoyed me for years. OK, there were bigger annoyances at the time, and work, family life, and obligation buried the problem for a long time. But yesterday, as I found myself typing a row of uppercase and I asked myself, "wtf is this?", I realised that enough is enough, and sometimes, we just gotta do what we gotta do.

So I decided to do something about it. The CAPS key is an abomination. We all know that. It's a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it's only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers.

Now, I can understand that the keyboard producers of the world don't really appreciate the problem. For them, one key is as good as another, and no-one's complained, so why change a perfectly good model?

Obviously the keyboard producers have been so indoctrinated that they don't even inspect their own products any longer. Listen, dudes: no-one wants that crummy CAPS key. It's history. It dates back to the times when bold meant going back and typing the same text twice.

And so I have launched CAPSoff, a campaign to change the world, one key at a time. We're going to start with the CAPS LOCK key, which is fat and useless and has no friends, so should be an easy target. Maybe after that we can gang up on the SysRq key.

To succeed, CAPSoff will need to convince a bunch of very large, very stupid organisations, that the computer users of the world really don't want this key. It's going to have to organise letter-writing campaigns, petitions, websites, and lots of activism. We may have to organise conferences, protests, and even sponsor pro-reform.political candidates.

Although the CAPS key may seem an easy target, we're going to have to get a lot of people involved and active, to get rid of it.

So this is my plan. How do we build such an organisation? Can we do it entirely using free services from Google? (I'm no special admirer of Google but it seems they're aiming to become the main web-based service provider.)

Can we organise entirely using free online tools? Google groups, Freenode irc?

I don't know. But it's going to be fun finding out.

Pieter Hintjens
Brussels