[GRLUG] Old Keyboard?

[Don Ellis]

Back when the first PC came out, I noticed how different the PC
keyboard was from the universally-admired IBM Word Processing/Typing
keyboard (mostly for these reasons). The Enter key on the PC was a
different shape that I expressed as "requires that the right little
finger be broken and reset at an angle".

I speculated that the PC keyboard was made deliberately hard to use in
order not to introduce competition with the well established IBM Word
Processing products.

Third party manufacturers quickly came out with clones of the WP
keyboards that had pretty decent actions (though seldom as nice as the
IBM keyboards), forcing IBM to [mostly] improve their keyboards back
to the previously expected level.

As for the Windows key (and caps lock), I have seldom if ever actually
used them on purpose. On my Mac, I have remapped the caps lock key to
be another Control key. A friend of mine has made it into
cmd-ctrl-alt-shift for some special functions in one of his favorite
programs.

--Don Ellis


On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Casey DuBois <casey at grlug.org> wrote:

...

> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 11:24 AM, Dave Chiodo <megadave at gmail.com> wrote:

...

>> On a REAL COMPUTER KEYBOARD:
>> Function keys keys belong on the left.
>> Control belongs to the left of the "A" key.
>> The enter key should be a big L shape taking up two rows, and the
>> backspace should be two keys wide.
>> Caps lock and so-called "windows" keys belong in Hell (but I can
>> ignore both if the rest is good)

...