I can certainly get each one of those as a digraph [e.g., in Vim Đ = D/, Þ = TH) and going to tri-, tetra- and the occasional pentagraph suffices even for languages with thousands of letters, like Chinese.
If you insist on lots of keys, it’s been done, but takes up a bit of real estate on your desk:
However all except minimalist keyboards these days still seem to have at least a few modifier keys: Shift of course, but also Control, Alt, variously labelled Meta, Super, Function, etc., if you feel like assigning bonus layouts you can access via chords like Super-Shift-D, Control-Alt-6, whatever you want.
Oh it’s tempting! I have somewhere in a cupboard, a working ortholinear programmable 128 key keyboard that has re-legendable keycaps - it was designed for EPOS use (something like below). I could have all the letters!
The thing I find mainly irritating is that when I need the serial number from some appliance it is at an out of the way, hard to read corner and I am supposed to be able to distinguish 0 from O and I from 1. Sure they look different here, but try to read bending in an awkward position.
BTW, I think it was standard for typewriters to omit 1 and 0 back when I was typing my thesis.
Something similar - my mother got a typewriter in the 40s; I was still using it in the 70s. There was no 1.
So not that long ago (10 years?) I was helping an area clean up data in their database. It took me forever to find the difference between
MedImpact
Medlmpact
computer kept telling me they weren’t the same. In this font, I can see a very slight difference (the I is taller than the l). Ended up comparing character by character to find the difference.
There are fonts specifically designed to be easy to distinguish between such letters, even though they aren’t the most comfortable to read for leisure.
An example is DP: Proofreading Font Comparison, designed for use by Distributed Proofreading project for converting old books to digital format.
When I was stationed in Germany, I bought myself a manual typewriter (of course used) although I had been using an American electric typewriter (with the numeral one on the number row) for a few years before then. Besides the slightly different layout, the German one had neither the 1 nor the 0. That took a bit more getting used to. I wonder if that was standard for German typewiters when it was manufactured or just happened to be the maker’s decision.
I have a very old, not sure how, Smith Corona without a one or the zero.
I got it from my Grannys house when she died. It never worked since I’ve gotten it. Not that the tape thing would be available.
I used to swap the key pads around to spell messages, where it sits on a shelf.
I was limited what I could say, but I got very creative. Long time before I knew phone key pad language from those old cel phones.
We had an old typewriter of that era at home that had no markings on the keys at all, just black keys. I think my parents got it from a rural one-room schoolhouse that closed; I suppose the thinking was that if you can’t see the letters on the keytops, you wouldn’t look at your hands when typing. The encyclopedia had a layout chart, and that’s how I learned how to type (including typing the letter ell when you want a one character, and the old trick of apostrophe-backspace-period for an exclamation mark).
I was shocked, shocked I say, when I took typing in high school (mandatory) and they made it too easy by actually having the letters on the keycaps. BTW, I was the class champion typist, for some reason.
On an old manual typewriter, if you hold down the “Shift” key and the Spacebar, you can type the apostrophe and the period and they will appear as the exclamation mark.
Same with lower case u, a, o, along with the quotation mark: vowels with umlauts!
When I was a kid, the home typewriter was a manual, upright Royal. The keys had little metal rings around them, perfect for trapping fingernails of innocent children, trying desperately to type a report on Sunday night that is due at the child’s first class, Monday morning.
