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The 10 Worst PC Keyboards of All Time
Kabz found the 10 Worst PC Keyboards of all time which leads off with the Commodore 64 and takes a trip through PCjr country. Might trigger some nostalgia, or some sort of flashback wrist strain.
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I don't know about the Commadore, but I loved the Commodore 64 despite its own keyboard; though on that computer the keyboard took quite the back-seat, in terms of irritation, to the tape deck...
Though he may be on to something, since, as I sit here typing this, I'm consciously flexing my wrists ever few seconds...
Apparently PC manufacturers have figured out the keyboard, given that the newest keyboard on this list is the #1 ranked IBM PCjr debuting in 1984.
The TRS-80 MC-10. Basically a Color Computer Lite. It was nearly impossible to type on using the standard way of typing.
Is it bad that I own 6 out of 10 of these keyboards and am looking for the other 4 to complete my collection?
The layout of the keyboard on the n810 is not that good either.
Its more geared (as the rest of things are on the device) for a right handed person and theres odd things missing.
(just a bit frustrated, the rest of the device is amazing)
liqbase
I always though the original Color Computer was pretty bad (4k of memory, so you couldn't type much anyhow) until I tried a Sinclair. But at least it kept out the liquids.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
This is a slow-news-day even for PC world. Back in the old days, cheap keyboards weren't nice. Shocker.
There is also this keyboard (image) which I came across in a CompUSA sale area for $4.99 or so.
It's big feature was that it had an extra three keys for Power, Sleep, and Wake. The problem is that these were right above the inverted-T, with Power being right next to Enter.
Caution: MyMiniCity alert!
I got about 10 of these old IBM 10 lb keyboards in reserve that sound
like a jack hammer while typing on them...
Best keyboard ever made!
Got Code?
10. Commodore 64 (1982)
The Commodore 64 sits on a mile-high pedestal in the adolescent memories of millions of people, but its keyboard design--shared by Commodore's earlier VIC-20--was incredibly clumsy. One glance at it reveals three major flaws. It was visually confusing, with too many symbols printed on each key. The computer's anti-ergonomic 2-inch height made it extremely hard on the wrists of untrained typists. And the keyboard's layout leaves much to be desired, with numerous examples of poor key placement. For example, the Home/Clear key sat directly to the left of Delete (Backspace), resulting in users' making repeated accidental hits and sending the cursor back up to the top of the screen. In addition, the layout was peppered with an unusually large number of nonstandard keys such as Run/Stop and Restore. Luckily, most C64 owners remained oblivious to these problems: More often than not, they used the C64 for playing games with joysticks, saving the heavy computing work for dad's IBM PC.
9. Timex Sinclair 2068 (1983)
In the process of "improving" the wildly successful Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the United States market, Timex ruined the line with a bastardized version known as the Timex Sinclair 2068. But the 2068 shared one significant feature with its progenitor that it should have left behind: an atrocious keyboard. It's no exaggeration to say that using the 2068's keyboard without training was like trying to type while drunk and blindfolded. Some of the keys controlled as many as six different functions. Just to rub it all in, the unit had no Backspace key, a fault of many other early home computers. Did the designers assume that typists would never make mistakes? I bet the masterminds behind the 2068's keyboard backspaced over this part of their design history long ago.
8. Commodore PET 2001-32-N (1978)
Critics hailed the revised, full-stroke keyboard of the updated Commodore PET (model 2001-32-N) as a huge improvement over Commodore's first PET keyboard. But Commodore still got a few layout points terribly wrong. For one thing, the design repeated the old "Run/Stop key placed directly to the left of the Return key" trick. For another, it went with the ever-popular "lack of Backspace" maneuver; to perform something resembling a Backspace, you had to hold Shift and the left/right cursor key above the numeric keypad. And since the creators of this keyboard included a numeric keypad in the design, they cleverly omitted numbers from the primary keyboard area altogether--if you pressed keys that would conjure up numbers on any other remotely semistandard QWERTY keyboard, you'd get symbols instead. And hey, has anyone seen the period key? Oh, it's over there on the numeric keypad.
7. Texas Instruments TI-99/4 (1979)
With the release of the TI-99/4 in 1979, integrated-circuit pioneer TI took its first shaky steps into the home computer market with a $1150 package that included a special monitor and a calculator-like Chiclet keyboard. Like the original Apple II, the 99/4 did not support lowercase letters. Because of this limitation, the Shift key served as a function modifier, with the functions typically marked on a plastic overlay. The most frustrating of these key combinations was Shift-Q, which would quit a program or reset the computer, much to the chagrin of users who lost a day's work while erroneously trying to capitalize the letter Q. The 99/4's layout problems extended beyond the Q conundrum: The Enter key sat where a Right Shift key would normally reside on a standard layout. Also, the keyboard had a space key instead of a spacebar, and it was located in an odd position. The design had no dedicated Backspace key,
So there really was keyboards without a backspace...And I always thought it was just a bad dream, like the one with the strange man, pickup van, and false promises of candy...
It's a good thing no one patented the backspace, though. Wait a minute, I think I just came up with a business plan!
Gnome: A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.
The TI99/4a did have real keys on their keyboard but they kept the absolutely dreadful layout. The worst part IMHO was that it was the first computer I ever owned so I got used to it. Oh the horror! It took years to break the bad habits I picked up there.
Okay, they get some credit for including the Atari 400 keyboard. That thing was useless.
I take issue with the complaint about the C64 keyboard. The only serious problem with the C64 keyboard was its integration with the computer so that every bang of a key sent a nice little shockwave into the electronics. The extra symbols were on the edge of the key and printed in a different color. It took about 5 minutes before the operator learned to ignore them. They were, however, extremely helpful to the software developers that wanted to use those symbols. I also don't recall having any trouble missing the backspace key and hitting clear/home. I can see how I might if I had previously been used to a long backspace key, but I wasn't previously used to one.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The original Pet: Worst. Keyboard. EVER.
The keys weren't even laptop-style "chicklet" keys... they were basically like the old number-tiles off the 4x4 sliding numbers puzzle. Remember those?
I didn't have a real problem with the C-64 keyboard... I was quite accustomed to it. The TRS-80, though... I couldn't stand it. But I'm not sure if that's entirely the fault of the keyboard.
Now get off my lawn.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Surely the ZX series must top the list with their rubbery, totally overloaded keyboards!
Loved my C64 warts and all.
How could they miss out the ZX-81 - a flat, plastic, touch-sensitive membrane with almost no tactile feedback... it was like typing wearing gauntlets
It was only slightly improved with the spectrum keyboard which was like typing on a the back of a slightly tacky, warty toad...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I started my life on computers with a PCJr that my dad brought home. I loved that thing dearly. And its wireless keyboard. Many hours gaming on Kings Quests, Space Quests, zork, hitchhikers guide text games, GWBasic cartridges. 16 colors. it was a grand machine.
And I remember the C64 keyboard being *good* for the time. They have the Sinclair 2068 keyboard, which if it was anything like the Spectrum 48k (for us Europeans) was pretty bad, although that was a step up from the rubber nightmare of the Spectrum 16k, which can be seen at http://s206301103.websitehome.co.uk/sinclair/picts/spectrum.jpg/ But even worse were the ZX80/ZX81 keyboards - http://www.vintagecomputer.net/sinclair/sinclair_zx81.jpg/. Not only were they small, awkward to use and with about 6 functions to each key, to much pressure on them would make the (obligatory) 16k RAM expansion wobble, thus giving you a user friendly hard reset. Moving up the C64 seemed like a dream in '83 or thereabouts.
I ponder, what is worse? That these are so memorable that they have made their own top 10, or that I've owned, worked on, or had to repair every single entry on the list at one time or another?
Incidentally, I first began programming at the age of 5 with the 7th on that list, the TI99/4
My first program looked like this:
10 REM
20 PRINT "HELLO"
30 GOTO 20
Took my grandparents close to half of an hour to figure out that they needed to reboot it.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Reasons why the "windows keys" suck:
- The windows keys have the wrong position and function. They are keys which result in an action, not modifiers. Put them elsewhere, but not beneath the CTRL and ALT keys for crying out loud!
- The key steals valuable space from the spacebar (no pun intended).
I still use a keyboard without one. I've gone so far and bought a number of defective keyboards of the same brand (at the time they were still common) to have replacement parts until the end of me.ZX81 is number 4...
No sig today...
A lot of cheap keyboards such as the Labtec standard keyboard (http://www.labtec.com/index.cfm/gear/details/EUR/EN,crid=28,contentid=631) use a non-standard layout where the Enter key is two rows high and the backslash key is in the top row, even in the US layout.
Why would anybody do that?
And don't get me started on the F-Lock key!
Having owned one, I would have put the Timex Sinclair 1000 on the list somewhere. They mention a Timex (the 2068) but the Sinclair 1000 was so bad because it was nothing but a budget membrane keyboard about 1/3 the size of a normal keyboard. There was no reasonable way to actually type other than hunt-n-peck and even then the keys were really finicky. Even magazines at the time complained about how bad the keyboard was.
Ahhh, the TRS-80 MC-10. I had one of those growing up. Yeah, that keyboard was definitely among the worst out there. It was even too small for my little 10-year-old hands...
This guy's the limit!
The Jupiter ace - worse than any of the keyboards on that list.
And let's be serious: Did anybody use any of those keyboards for word processing as the author seems to imply. Most of them were only used for typing "load" to get games into memory.
No sig today...
Oh my god, am I getting old. I have at one time or another used most of them at least once.
I would be very interested in that.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Just before I hit slashdot to find this article, I was *literally* just looking at the keyboard of my new Lenovo Thinkpad and thinking that keyboards don't hold up like they used to. The surfaces of the keys, in just a short while, have worn appreciably. The pessimist in me thinks that manufacturers are reducing durability of keyboard so as to keep that "new laptop smell" appeal.
But then I thought, "what if these things have the same lead problem as the Chinese toys?"
I'm quite certain that even the most well-designed lead-laden keyboard would be worse than the worst-design on this list.
Has anyone tested keyboards for lead yet?
More
The Kaypro 10 was a luggable CP/M 2.2 machine cased in a steel box and painted dark green. I loved it. But the keyboard, which doubled as a snapon lid, had a harsh forward edge that was too easy to put your wrists on. Ok, I had no real reason to own a Kaypro, but you could play Adventure on it — which I did for hours at a time. It was my own damn fault, then: The ring and pinky fingers on both hands went completely numb, except for the blaze of fiery pain in my wrists. To this day, I cannot touch my left pinky with my left thumb — my left hand spasms and trembles like Michael J. Fox.
To be fair, my brother wrote a Ph.D. dissertion (using WordStar) on that monster, and he didn't destroy his carpal tunnels. Lucky stiff.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
The only one of those I've had the displeasure of using is the Atari 400 keyboard. Wow. What a monstrosity. It sure looked all FUTURY, though. In fact, I imagine any of those keyboard that were designed to be flat with little-to-no tactile feedback are going to be winners (loser?) among the category.
There are some modern keyboards that suck, too. Most of them are on UMPCs, cell phones, and the occasional laptop.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Either that or he/she is illiterate. Commadore? What kind of a bullshit waste of space is this "journal?" Is this Slashdot's way of generating page hits now, just grabbing random garbage out of user journals and slapping it on the front page?
The image is piss poor and has been edited (the 3 extra keys were the same size as all the others), but it IS real. My parents had one. I ended up prying the extra keys up with a screwdriver and covering the holes with duct tape less than a week after they got it. It was a nightmare.
They have the unerring ability to buy the worst keyboards imaginable. I remember they bought some super-duper multimedia/internet/gaming keyboard with about a dozen extra buttons they could never possibly need to use...the sucker came with a ten meg "driver" and hundreds of megs of terrible "trial" software. They hated it, but used it for almost two years.
They replaced it with a "travel" sized keyboard with miniscule keys and no space between the different key blocks and they were forever making typos and hitting insert or delete when they went to use the arrow pad or hit backspace. I ended up prying up the entire insert / delete / home / end / pgup / pgdn block of keys AND all the F keys in the top row.
And then they bought a Microsoft Natural keyboard. That was the only time they actually threw away a keyboard that still worked. All the others were worked to death. They used this one for maybe a month--tops.
I buy their keyboards for them now...
I'm writing my own article on worst navigation by a Web site. This PCWorld page will clearly be number 1 on my list.
How can you write an article about bad keyboards without describing how they feel? Only the Mattel Aquarius was described as gummy, abysmal and bouncy...
Sounds to me like the author never actually typed on most of them. It's easy to download a bunch of pics from some PC museum site and speculate about how bad their key layout, etc. was.
I remember the C64 as the most beautiful feeling keyboard of all time. The keys had a great molded shape and quiet, luxurious, damped action. Two inches tall? You're not supposed to type with your wrist on the table, man.
My TRS-80 Colour Computers (II and III) had cheap noisy keys with toy-like spring action. I can confirm the Timex Sinclair had not only an impractical layout, but the worst feel of anything I've ever used. Typing was so difficult that you could enter keywords with just one press ("GOTO"!). Somehow that didn't make it any better.
Shouldn't they have gotten an honorable mention or a life time achievement award? Yes all the ones on the list are worse but the point is even Mac users complain about typing on Mac keyboards. They're okay for software use and basic data entry but have you ever tried typing for hours on one? Tired sore fingers. PC keyboards in general have a nice snap and you can tell when you've hit a key. Mac keyboards are always too small and cramped. I hated the previous one which was stiff, thick feeling and far too small so it was easy to hit two keys at once, I have big hands. Ironically I like the new design better but I still go back to my PCs for real typing and I even hate e-mailing on the Mac. Stunning hardware in general but their keyboards and mice suck. I use an after market mouse on mine but I couldn't find an after market keyboard that worked. They also tend to be frail. The Mighty Mouse I got with my last Mac died in a week that's why I got the after market wireless, works great. Also the previous keyboard design I found died every time I used dust off on one. I killed the first one and thought it had to be a coincidence or a freak piece of dust getting in the wrong place. Nope. Second keyboard I got after a while I tried dust off and it stopped working. I got it working again after a few hours. Needless to say I never used dust off on it again.
...or, in my case, the VIC-20, virtually identical.
The nonstandard layout criticism shouldn't apply, because in those days there were no standards for video terminal keyboards or computer keyboards.
The knock on keyboard height is legitimate but overstated. It was about the same height as other video terminal keyboards in its day. The Europeans instituted ergonomic regulations that resulted in very slim, low-height keyboards we're familiar with, but they didn't really start to take hold until, say, 1980 or so.
At the time, I regularly used numerous computer terminals at work, including most major brands: DEC's VT100, the $5000 built-like-a-tank-no-corners-cut HP2648A, the LSI ADM3A, and many others; and I spent a lot of keying time on the Apple ][.
The HP2648A happened to be the one that made my hands hurt, because (for some reason) the keys featured a combination of a fairly large travel distance and a fairly stiff spring.
The VIC-20 and Commodore 64 had a very nice feel to them and were very easy on the hands, apart from keyboard height.
Keyboard height in itself was not a problem if you held you hands correctly (which I did) or used a wrist rest.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
At the bottom of the
Wow... I mean, different strokes for different folks, but that's fucked up...
Am I the only one who's just waiting to see the "10 worst 10 worst lists of all times"?
/., and it's not just the net, one of our networks has a more or less periodic "the 10 best/worst/whatever..." show. I honestly wonder who watches that. It's not like there is any objective 10 best/worst of anything. Be it music, movies or celebrities blunders.
Those lists are, at best, subjective. Ok, maybe not as subjective as the "10 best games" or the "10 most important inventions", but what the hell are those lists about?
I know, one may argue "if you don't care, ignore it". Ok. But it's not just
So what is that about? Telling me what the best/worst 10 of whatever are? If you don't mind, I'll make up my own mind about that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The ZX81 was there - in the guise of the Timex 1000, but its predecessor, the ZX80 wasn't.
I remember when I sold my Sinclair ZX80 and bought the Sinclair ZX81 - and marvelled at the relative comfort of its keyboard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80 Compared to the ZX80, the Commodore keyboard was a joy.
In fact every machine Sinclair made had a slightly dodgy keyboard - the QL was a pain to word-process on and the Cambridge Z88 was - effective, and quiet, but took some getting used to.
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
...I'm afraid I don't recall the brands, but several makers of video terminals used layouts that inserted an extra key in the bottom row, thus placing the CTRL key one key-width farther left than usual. Of course that required relearning--whenever I used one of those keyboard, for the first half-hour or so I'd keep hitting the extra key when I meant to hit CTRL, but that wasn't the problem.
The problem was that every CTRL combination required you to stretch your pinky that much further from the rest of your fingers than usual.
And one of them was at a company that used emacs as their standard text editor.
That was the only time in my life that using a computer made my hands, or rather my left hand, hurt so badly that I was on the verge of seeing a doctor. I trained myself to type all CTRL combinations using two hands, and the problem gradually subsided.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Need to upgrade or repair your computer keyboard? Missing a service manual? Here is a collection of free take apart instructions, disassembly pictures, upgrade and repair manuals, as well as do-it-yourself (DIY) tips and tricks for computer keyboards. There is also a section about custom made (adaptive) keyboards.
The point of the page layout is so that when reading the whole thing, you get to load 11 sets of advertisements. :S Personally its layouts like these that make me feel justified in using adblock, loading all those ads 11 times is a waste and slows down each pageload.
All posts released under the GNU Free Documentation License
What pisses me off about this article is that this is PCWorld saying "The worst PC keyboards of all time", but then they show a bunch of what the status quo would now call non-PC computers. I hate that hypocrisy.
I thought they were all personal computers?
Ok i fail to understand why it's not there,,,i might be un-geek right there but it should be listed.
...for its time. Particularly the thinner version.
But where the fuck is the ZX Spectrum? AKA "The Rubber".
Now THAT was a bad one. Pocket calculator keypad pretending to be a keyboard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ZXSpectrum48k.jpg
Even the later + version was a bit strange with its cursor keys set left and right from the space bar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ZX_Spectrum%2B.jpg
But saying C64 had too many symbols per key, and not mention the Spectrum is just plain ignorant.
For fucks sake - ZX had up to 6 symbols/commands attached to a single key.
Maybe there is a special 0 spot in the TFA that I missed?
Nope, there isn't.
And what is with all that hate for the BREAK key?
I remember it being quite useful for breaking all those GOTO 10 programs.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
HP keyboards: They for some reason omitted the "windows key" to the right of the spacebar, like all the other keyboards have. I find myself missing it quite a bit do to quick shortcuts(bring up explorer, run, etc). My work keyboard has since been replaced with a cheesy Logitech one. Someday I'll get around to repmapping the "context menu key"(which I have never used ever) to the windows key on my HP laptop.
They missed those Microsoft multimedia keyboards, the default are idiotic commands instead of the function keys! In Windows Explorer: F2 is undo instead of rename, F5 is open instead of refresh. Mine is a wireless one, no LED's on the keyboard. I do also hate laptops keyboards.
I have two IBM's PC-AT keyboards. Can't currently use 'em in my PC (no PS/2 ports), I agree they're awesome.
The Apple Adjustable Keyboard if you stick the the main keyboard it may be good for RSI but they put an awful lot of buttons on the satellite keypad. We bought one or two at work the staff didn't really like them.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Mostly, I don't understand why the article complains so much about old keyboards, from times when everyone, including the computer companies, was still working things out. There are perfectly crappy keyboards on the market right now. Sure, they have a "standard" layout, but after using them for 3 weeks the keys start to rub off so you can start to learn touch-typing, except that the tactile feedback is nonexistent and the keypresses unreliable. I'd consider that much worse than having key X next to key Y.
Also, can we add the article to the list of "10 worst article navigation methods"?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I posess a few keyboards that were really nice in their early days, but after some use, became stuff, as if the plastic doesn't slide on the plastic as well. You have to hit the keys dead center, or else they give you a great deal of resistance.
Sadly, one of this is the otherwise beautiful Apple bluetooth keyboard, with one of the best feels to it, otherwise. Does anyone know if it's possible to clean/lubricate such a keyboard to bring back a smooth feel? I have torn down and rebuilt the Apple one, cleaning the plastic parts with isoproply, but it's still stiff. I'm hesistant to put "goo" in there to make it smoother, but maybe it is the best option? What is a good choice? Vaseline, or does it break down plastic? Silicone lubricate? Lithium grease? Any suggestions? I don't want to tast my beautiful bluetooth keyboard, but I do want it to be smoother.
Thanks....
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Any electronic device more than a couple of years old WILL have lead in it: it's in the solder holding the components on the board. It's only in the last couple of years that it's been outlawed in Europe under WEEE. The consequences of this for long-term reliability remain to be seen.
(this is not a
Anyway wanna know what the best keyboard of ALL time? IBM 3279 mod4 - you could bash just about anything or anyone with it.
...because aside from its sound it was a rather mediocre machine.
I dunno, given that the real competitors to the C=64 was the Atari 400 and the T.I. 99/4, I think it wasn't so bad.
The Atari 400 and the TI 99/4 were released almost 3 years before (1979) the C64 (1982). They were the VIC-20's competition, not the C64's competition.
Atari's competition to the C64 was intended to be the 1200XL (similar capability and also released in 1982). It's too bad you never owned one of those, because it's keyboard was VASTLY superior to the C64's. Also, the 1050 disk and the 1010 tape drives were both better then the commodore equivalents and it had better graphics than the C64.
Sadly, the 1200XL had compatibility problems with the 400 and 800, and Atari couldn't make money with the price pressure put upon it by the C64, so the 800XL was brought out that ironed out some bugs integrated BASIC into built-in ROM, etc, but in its cost cutting effort the keyboard was of lower quality (yet still better than the C64).
Also, at what point does price enter into this? C=64 was around $199 at the time the PC came out at, oh 7 or 8 times the price...
The IBM PC came out a few months BEFORE the C64 you know, and the C64 didn't start out at such a low price, it just got there quite quickly.
Also, to make the C64 usable you had to add a tape or floppy, and most likely a printer. The floppy cost more than the C64 itself for a time when supply was much smaller than demand. Also, the C64 and the 800XL were quite closely priced, and the 800XL was faster and had better graphics and a better keyboard even though it was a "cheapened 1200XL" design.
I also owned a Coleco ADAM which was sold as a package with built in tape drive and printer included. in 1984 it was about $100 cheaper than a comparable C64 system. The Coleco TAPE drive literally loaded faster than the C54 FLOPPY drive, and a Coleco tape held 75% more data than a C64 floppy. The Coleco CPU ran at 4 times the clock speed of the C64 and could do raw computations ad a bit more than twice the speed of the C64, and it had dedicated video RAM so nearly all the 64K of main ram could be available for applications. Above all, the ADAM keyboard was of very high quality--it had about 75 keys and 4 properly-arranged actual arrow keys (not 2 arrow keys side-by-side that needed the shift key to move up and down). Made it really good for typing out papers.
Looking back, the C64 was really a lesson in marketing--there was technically superior competition out there on all fronts except sound--it had a bad keyboard, bad BASIC with barely more than 50% of ram usable, very slow floppy, middle-of-the-road graphics and was a bit flimsy. It was, however, very well marketed, priced very aggressively and had the best software library out there (pretty much all the hit games of the Atari and better application software in addition). All that momentum led to third-party enhancements to overcome many C64 weaknesses. Still had a bad keyboard for years though.
MC-10. My first PC. Borrowed a book from a friend with a bunch of BASIC games and quickly learned how to modify the games to be more entertaining. Wrote my own crude etch-a-sketch program from scratch. Wow, the memories...
1983? I was 10...
My 11 year old son is whipping me silly. Play video games? nah, he'd rather modify the subsurfaces controlling the wire frames of his latest character he has created in blender. (or something like that - I honestly have very little idea of what he's doing, but it looks cool!)
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
I'm talking about the surface of the keys (which come into contact with your fingers) - not the internal components.
If the lead can be transferred onto the fingers, then it will no-doubt wind up in your mouth or otherwise introduced into the body.
See the news on the recent toy recalls, which stem from lead.
More
But remarkably thorough for a troll, don't you think? You can tell he really put some effort into that one.
Althought I enjoy what they are trying to do, they missed one of the worst: this. Seriously - it looks cool, but have you ever tried to type on one of these? Suuuck. And, though not a pc keyboard: iphone.
http://www.coderoshi.com/
Every fucking laptop keyboard that has the function button where the control should be. As a developer I use control all the time or skipping over or selecting whole words. It's not often I require the ability to dim my screen or switch to an external monitor.
Yep, glad to see that was in the list.
If you didn't own a ZX81 then, well, you don't have a debilitating wrist injury*. It even made the "dead flesh" ZX Spectrum keyboard seem good by comparison.
*Do your own joke here.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
if you got the service manual, the crosspoint matrix for the keypad was printed cleverly therein. I put a DB-25 on the back of my 400, horse-whipped an old keyboard off something or other from the surplus store with telco wire, and had a grand old experience.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It did not have a QWERTY keyboard but an ABCDEF keyboard! All the keys were placed in alphabetical order. It was probably great for a novice, but for someone like myself who was used to typewriters it was horrible.
... /. is slowly turning into Digg ...
* Apple Extended Keyboard II
* IBM Model M
* IBM Selectric (Typewriter)
I can't really think of any other absolutely outstanding ones. Right now, I use an Apple Extended Keyboard II through a ADB to USB adapter, but it's starting to get flaky. I can't tell whether it's the adapter or the keyboard, but it's started dumping random characters into the keystream more or less of its own accord. Since AEKIIs are extremely hard to come by, I think I'll probably get a Model M (and a AT or PS2 to USB) to replace it. The only downside to the Model M is that it's so unbelievably loud compared even to other buckling-spring designs.
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The article is divided into several pages, and I don't see any link to go to the next page, except... at the beginning of each page! I use Firefox under Ubuntu dapper 6.06 LTS. Has anyone the same problem of anti-ergonomic layout with this website?
It gets completely ruined by those darned clear plastic covers people put on. I hate the bloody thing, sitting there, making the keyboard feel different, it actually tires my hands trying to subconsciously "push through" it to type.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I bought an Atari 400 in high school, but didn't use it for typing papers. It was strictly a programming and game machine for me, and I did all my papers on a manual typewriter. The keyboard wasn't horrible for low volume typing, as long as you didn't try to use it like a typewriter; the trick was to slide your fingers along the surface and push instead of tapping. Kind of like using LCARS on ST:TNG (which uses voice input for anything that would otherwise require typing).
When I started college I bought a C64. For the superior typing keyboard.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Modern keyboards are honestly worse than those they listed. These old keyboards don't even begin to compare to the horrors of a modern keyboard. These days, there is a keyboard standard, which nobody follows. Every manufacturer has their own ideas on how to make a keyboard more ergonomic. Which basically means shuffling the keys around in a fashion where you repeatedly hit the wrong key, and adding bizarre and seldom used special keys in the middle of the keyboard. All this does is make you throw the keyboard in the garbage, and break out your old PC keyboard from 1993.
There can only be one modern keyboard attached to your computer, and it is the Logitech UltraX. Besides the extremely cheesy name, they are quite wonderful. Handles like a laptop keyboard, but with no "fn" key or touch pad. There are special keys, but they are located in a place where they never get in the way. The layout is as PC-standard as it gets. All keys are properly dimensioned and situated. It's sleek, it's beautiful. Truly, one of the best keyboards ever to be made.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
"To those of us who have learned to type blindly at a decent speed, the big layout, clicking sound and unmistakeable tactile feedback are actually pro's"
Amen brother. I can't use any other keyboard. When you've hit a key on a model M, baby you KNOW you've hit a key. There's just neevr any question. It takes up too much space on a desk? Oh. 1) Tough 2) So? 3) get a bigger desk ya pansy.
Plus they're $2 in thrift shops. Hell, sometimes if I'm in some funky computer store and see one tucked away and ask they'll often as not say "it's too old to be useful just take it". Yeah baby, score.
Plus you can take them apart eight ways from sunday and they're nearly impossible to kill. And how many other 25 year old computer products are still usefull today?
Come to think of it my car and microwave are also 25 years old and better than any of the crap found new today.
Huh, they really were the good old days.
I do take the caps lock key off though. It's annoying to HIT IT INSTEAD OF TAB.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Kabz found the ...
For a second, I read that as "Katz" and gave a little shudder.
Rich
An interesting thing about the article is that there are no actual "PCs" in the list of the 10 worst PC keyboards, except possibly the PCjr. To those of us who grew up in the days of the Atari, Commodore, Apple II and TI 99/4, the term "PC" applied to IBM's line of computers based on the Intel platform (the PC was built around the 8086/8088 processor, then came the AT/ATX with the 80286). When you bought software, it would be specified for PC or Apple, or some other platform, with PC always meaning IBM specifically (running DOS usually).
We never called our home computers "PCs" unless they ran MSDOS or similar.
The C64 "breadbox" case was a bit worrisome, yes, and the keys were a bit stiff compared to modern keyboards, but the layout wasn't that bad. The only major thing that I missed back then was the fact that only rich kids in far-away big cities got Nordic letters, and even if you did got those, you lost other characters, so what's the point?
Aside of that, the keyboard was pretty good. And there's nothing nonstandard about "Run/Stop" - people just call it "Esc" in PC-land. =)
Of course, recent products solve this problem by removing the raised border, thus eliminating the very last bit of tactile feedback. Go, progress!
(Yeah, I know, it's not a full size computer, blah blah blah. Still.)
The Commodore 64 was an awesome gaming platform with tons of buttons.
The INST DEL key on the keypad is the delete or 'backspace' key. Using SHIFT with it would allow inserting text into a line.
Just because it isn't labeled 'backspace' - sheesh. How about these losers look at a MacBook - there's only two 'delete' keys on that.
...who had these backspace-less pc's as our first computers in high school/college, it was a good thing to not have a backspace key. That helped prepare us for our first programming jobs as we graduated with our fresh CompSci degrees in the mid 1980's since our employers at our first entry-level programming jobs expected us to never make any typing mistakes, since we were basically getting paid by the number of lines of code we wrote (in essence, by the keystroke). Many of us were still programing via IBM keypunch machines (as late as 1985), and if you made a typo, you literally wasted a paper card and had to start your line of code over again on the next card. We were given a fixed budget of card wastage to account for typos and if you exceeded that, they docked us a nickel per card off our paycheck. That provided the incentive to learn to type error free. All us entry-level grunts had to use the card punch, only the senior programmers who'd been there 3 years or longer earned the privilege of having a green screen terminal. And yes, we our programming was indeed done in COBOL and FORTRAN.
First off, and on-topic, I've used several of the referenced computers: Commodore PET AND c64, TI 99/4A, Atari 400, and PC-Jr. They were all pretty bad for typing, except I don't recall having much trouble with the C64 (shrug). I actually got the Atari 400 for my parents and sibs as a gaming machine and it did just fine for that (I got an 800 and that had a real keyboard - enjoyed it greatly).
<graybeard_mode=ON>
My _first_ access to a computer was with an ASR-33 teletype (TTY). I was in middle school and we'd DIAL the phone and place its handset into the acoustical coupler. That gave us 110 baud access to the high school's DEC PDP-8. The TTY had a manual action which moved various levers and the like so it was hard work typing. That was, until I discovered there was an interconnection between the keys which allowed the currently pressed key to be pushed back UP when I pressed DOWN on the next key. (Like a see-saw.) At one point, I could finish typing and wait 10 seconds for the TTY to catch up. Anyone else experience the "joys" of using the paper tape punch and reader for program storage? Where you could physically SEE each and every bit of storage on the tape. ;)
<graybeard_mode=OFF>
http://www.apple.com/keyboard/
(yes, too much karma to spare)
I can't believe that the C64's keyboard was given a worse rating than the Atari 400? If I remember well enough, wasn't there a model that had a keyboard grid that overlayed the plastic pressure keys?
All I can remember of the Atati 400 was having not having a natural feel while typing on it. It seemed I spent more time holding a single key down until the keyboard registered that I was pressing the key.
It was the Atari 400's keyboard that kept me away from that thing.
1. Add an unsubstantiated, inflamatory remark about an Apple product at the end of your article
2. ???
3. ???
4. Profit
The comment below the original Commodore PET keyboard (The 'Chicklet' style) says that for reasons 'lost to history' belies the failure of the article's author to do any substantive research. The reason why Commodore selected this awful keyboard was to use internal economies by making use of calculator keyboards and that technology that Commodore (which was a big calculator manufacturer in the 1970s) already owned. Further information behind this design decision can be found in the excellent book of Commodore history by Brian Bagnall called: On the Edge - The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore
True. Still, its a dupe.
By "all time", they mean from 1977 through 1984 obviously.
At the time I couldn't afford a Commodore, so I got an Atari, but I was certain I didn't want the 400, with that flat keyboard, so I got the 800 instead. Not much better, but at least it had keys.
And not even original
I don't care why you're posting AC
I liked the fact that Commodore keyboards had the alternate symbols printed on the keys. On a Mac I can get alternate symbols using Option with an appropriate letter key, but because those alternate symbols aren't printed on the keys, one either has to memorize them, use a cheatsheet, or find the symbol by trial and error. I've been using Macs for over 10 years and I still have to hunt around for the integral symbol (Option-B). I don't know what the author has against putting mnemonics like that on the keyboard.
I usually use the left logo key, but that may be personal preference. I always use the left shift key as well... and the left control key too, but let's face it, the right control key is located in Reykjavík. "Right alt" on my keyboard is actually an altgr, which I use regularly.
The logo keys are very useful because they enable a sort of system-wide shortcut system that is completely separate from the application level shortcuts under control etc. For example, if I want to open a document, run a script, open a webpage, I can press logo+R. I use that particular combo so much that I've removed to corresponding entry from the start menu. Similar logo+D (desktop), logo+E (explorer), logo+F1 (help) and others.
The context menu key is very useful because the concept of a "context" is well defined even when you're not working with the mouse. For example, if you are typing the current selection or cursor location is a very useful "context" for such a menu. I you are using the arrow keys to select files in a folder window, ditto.
Perhaps I should remap the right shift and control to do something useful... suggestions?
It would seem that many of the early computer programmers didn't know how to type properly. These calculator-type keyboards were okay if you were used to hunt-and-peck typing, but awful if you tried to touch type. So you either came to computers as a hunt-and-pecker, started on computers as your first exposure to typing (like me), or banged your head against the keyboard since it'd have the same outcome as applying your touch typing muscle knowledge.
Maybe it wasn't such a big deal back then for typing to be slow and inefficient. Computers didn't have much memory or much networking. A few thousand characters is all the software could take anyway, unlike today when big documents, long variable names, and online chat are common.
By the way, how many Slashdotters know how to touch type? I took a typing (as in typewriter) class in high school to fulfill some domestic skill requirement and it's one of the most useful things I ever learned. By the time my brother got to high school they were calling it keyboarding instead. Is that a common requirement these days?
Oh my god, my parents got me one of those Aquarius things (I'm an old-timer). It's still sitting in a box somewhere. The article does a fair job of describing the keyboard as "gummy" but it does no justice to the absolute horror of spending more than 10 minutes trying to use it. The only interactive confirmation that the user got that a key was successfully pressed was by watching the screen. The keys had no give to them at all, and you had to guess how hard each key needed to be pressed to produce results (each key had its own level of responsiveness). Add this to the fact that so much of what you had to do with this keyboard included using the SHIFT and CTRL keys, and you have a horror show. To this day, I have nightmares about the following things:
...except the Aquarius versions had crappier sound and graphics. And the game controllers were actually WORSE than on the Intellivision, which is an impressive achievement.
* Did I press the button or not? The cursor didn't move. But I know I pressed the key. I'll press it again. Hmmm, nothing happened this time either. What if I press it really hard? Oh god, now there are two of them. I should backspace. Where's the backspace key?
* Being near the end of typing in a huge BASIC program (such as the "simulated analog clock") and accidentally hitting that horribly misplaced "RESET" button.
* You would think that the feature to use a "control" key as a way to bring up BASIC command macros assigned to each key would help, but it really doesn't. You have to search the keyboard overlay for the right command every single time, and a lot of the time you're searching for something that isn't there and you have to type it in longhand anyway.
* Typing in a huge BASIC program found in a student textbook, only to find out that the Aquarius didn't have enough RAM to contain it, or didn't support certain BASIC commands that were standard on every other interpreter. Oh, and...
* There were never any storage devices that worked for the Aquarius. They were promised, but they were either never released or put out in a very limited release. No disk drives and not even any stupid tape recorders, a la Commodore. It turned out that the planned tape recorder never even worked consistently anyway.
* Aquarius BASIC by Micro-Soft (c) 1982
* Wow, they have some of the same games as the Intellivision!
God damn, I wasted tons of time trying to make that thing usable.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
I think that first entry is a troll right out of the Dvorak school.
1. Anti-ergonomic? What keyboards were "ergonomic" in those days? It had full-stroke mechanical keys with tactile feedback .
2. Visually confusing? WTF? Would it have been better to simply make the user memorize where all the special characters were? Those alternate characters were the closest thing you could get to doing graphical screen lay out in those days, and I used them all the time to put borders and check boxes on programmable forms.
3. Non-standard keys? Compared to what? Electric typewriters? That was the same keyboard layout used by all C= machines up to that point, including the PET. And, sorry, I never accidentally hit the HOME key when I wanted to hit backspace.
4. And I won't condescend to address the claim that most C=64 users used the joysticks more than the keyboard. The C=64 had a huge and avid hacker community. Do you think we keyed in all those assembly language programs with the joystick?
Bah.
The C=64/Vic-20 keyboard was fine. Especially compared to the older PET keyboard. I don't know how many people will remember that thing but it had perfectly square keys with flat tops.
Clear, Dark Skies
I don't know if TFA includes anything about membrane keyboards (can't access the site for some reason), but the most horrible keyboard I remember was that of Soviet Elektronika BK-0010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_BK - a PDP-11 ripoff) - a home computer with Focal interpreter and a horrible keyboard, where a thin film with printed keys was stretched what looked like ordinary keyboard keys with the actual key "cap" removed. It was horribly slow to type at, prone to errors and gave out an annoying beep on each keypress.
Next version BK-0011 - had "ordinary" keyboard, except the keys were prone to stick and creaked when pressed, so you often had to use a pen or knife to get them unpressed.
The white keyboard coming with the first generation G5 Power Mac was the worst I've ever used. It had hardly any space between the keys, and I constantly pressed more than one key. Apart from that, it was super elegant and didn't have any cover. So huge amounts of dust, dirt and food collected over they years. And as with many things coming from Apple, it was almost impossible to open up and clean.
While the C64 keyboard was somewhat unpleasant to use, it didn't have any of these problems.
I was a tech in a basement of a major oil company...they issued me this Dell "quietkey" keyboard for my PC. I have occupied open top cubes next to mine and techs in them... Now..I don't know how the name quietkey came about...but the keyboard they game me was one of the loudest I've ever typed on...I type a consistent 90-120wpm...it took less than 5 minutes of typing before I got my first complaint. "The clicking of your typing is driving me nuts!" I still have that keyboard somewhere.. :)
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you...
MS makes them, and their design is just too weird: Weird Keyboard design, although I know some people that really really loves that design, I simply hate it.
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
I don't have a microwave. I have a clock that occasionally heats stuff up.
No.
I will NOT slog through 11 separate page loads to read this puff-piece article. I understand that each selection of "next page" may result in additional revenue to the hosting site. However, I will not separately select one paragraph at a time for this. It's just not important enough. If the site offered "single page" or "print" options, I would comply... but not one page at a time. It's just not that imporant. Sorry.
from the article, re C64: "the layout was peppered with an unusually large number of nonstandard keys such as Run/Stop and Restore."
I was 5 years old at the time, so I may be misremembering, but in what sense was there a "standard" keyboard at the time of the C64's release?
Sure, the alphanumerics were standard QWERTY as derived from typewriters, but the Apple II line had different utility keys than the Atari 8-bits, than Commodores, than the IBM PC-XT, than the IBM PC-AT. It wasn't until the Wintel monoculture really took root in the mid-'90s that any sort of consistency in PC keyboard layout took hold.
re Sinclair 2068 et al: "the unit had no Backspace key, a fault of many other early home computers. Did the designers assume that typists would never make mistakes?"
Who needs a dedicated Backspace key when you have shift-Delete, or ctrl-d, or whatever other key combination was bound to the 'backspace' action in software...?
On the other hand, I LOVE the speccy keyboard so much I'm considering getting one of those roll-up USB ones in the hope that they feel similar.
But to keep you happy, they've effectively placed it at #9, just 'above' the C64, so they agree with you. The trick is that they've put in the Timex 2068, because they're a bunch of Americans.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I really can't believe the TS1000 didn't win, hands down. The article does a good job of describing the pain involved in typing on this thing - membrane, flat, nearly no throw or feedback, and tiny. And programming on it was just awful. While the article mentions that when programming in basic you use a wacky series of modifiers and single keys to put in a basic instruction, but what it doesn't point out is that wasn't just a shortcut - you *have* to do it that way. You can't just type in "print", you *have* to use ctl-alt-shift-p or whatever the combination was. Effectively, the BASIC interpreter didn't have to tokenize, because it made the programmer do it.
Incidentally, I still have the TS1000, as well as another on the list, the MC-10. They keyboard on the MC-10 is MUCH better and, as I recall[0], the BASIC shortcuts were indeed shortcuts rather than tokens.
[0]: It has probably been 15 years since I used either of these machines, so hopefully I'm not mixing up which one made you use the shortcuts and which one didn't.
The keyboard on the ti-99/4 was shit but the ti-99/4a was no wonderful invention ether. It still suffered from a shitty placed reset key. The TI reset switch showed no mercy ether. You hit that fucker and it was gone. None of this, "are you sure you want to reset" bullshit. Just *BEEP* your fucked. Every single TI owner has horror stories over that fucker. Working all night and go to press shift-0, I think, but hit func-0 and it was over.
And it had wierdly placed quote and other keys. that should have been on the nubmer keys where instead accessable with the func- key. Like func-p to get quotes.
But I still loved that computer. I guess we never really get over our first love. Until she comes out of no where after 20 years, asks for your help on something then shoves a knife in your back, an gives it twist just for kicks. Sorry.. i've had a shitty week.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
The only issue I have ever had with the C64 is the placement of the @ symbol. The quote is SHIFT-2, and the @ symbol is its own key. That can be problematic, though for me it did become second nature.
I use the TI-99/4A as well. A number of punctuation marks are FCTN keys, like the quote is FCTN-P. That can get annoying, but still usable. And a LOT better than the 99/4 keyboard layout -- at least the 4A has lower-case!
It's good to see Tandy/Radio Shack represented on the list, but I think they should have included the TRS-80 Model I. It had horrible keyboard bounce: practically any time you hit a key, it would produce the same character multiple times on the screen. You could buy aftermarket software that tried to get rid of the effect. Also, although this is not strictly a keyboard issue, the character generator could only produce uppercase on the screen, reportedly saving Radio Shack 35 cents on every machine produced. A lot of the early-model TRS-80's also had bimetallic connections between the components, so the connectors would corrode rapidly. Every few weeks, you had to rub off the corrosion with a pencil eraser.
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1. C-64 had a bad keyboard? C'mon, get real. The C-64/Vic-20 had one of the greatest keyboards of its class. The only one that could be considered as better was that of the Apple IIe and THAT was way more expensive. I had no problem typing from one.
2. How come that a list of the 10 worst keyboards of all time fails to mention the utterly horrible keyboard of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum??? (*shudder*)
3. "Modern" $5 keyboards (and a lot of the more expensive models) seriously belong to any list of the world's worst keyboards. Fragile keys, keys such as "power off" and "suspend" placed in the traditional place of Insert/Home/PgUp, just begging to be accidentally pressed; crappy Windows keys, and a general lack of reliability... and they don't make the list?? PLEASE!
P.S.: The original IBM PC keyboard was also widely despised for having a key between Shift and Z, thus surprising a lot of touch typists.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
How can a discussion on bad keyboards be complete without the space cadet keyboard? How much worse can you get than the keyboard responsible for emacs key bindings?
My work is mostly writing and I rarely use the mouse. Indeed, I'm chagrined when programs force me to take my hands off the keyboard, grab the mouse, locate the pointer, move it to a specific location on the screen, click the button, and then move my hand back to the keyboard. It's an interruption in my work-flow and an annoyance. If there were a way to go totally mouse-free, without losing the usefulness of the GUI, I'd be there.
Here's an example: while typing this response, I fat-fingered interruption. Since my browser is Firefox, it helpfully underlined "interrutpion" for me. I could have taken my hand off the keyboard an right-clicked the misspelling to get the correction, but instead I moved the cursor back one word (ctrl + <-) and clicked the menu key to see the list of corrections. I clicked the correction, pressed enter, and was back typing without ever moving my hands from the keyboard. Nice!
Generally, I use keyboard shortcuts for almost everything I do while using a writing tool. Unfortunately, among the programs I'm constrained to use, support for keyboard shortcuts isn't universal. Which means that the menu key is a useful tool for me.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The early Apple ][ Keyboard had the reset key right over the return key. This would always cause me to accidently reset the computer. This is only matched by the new keyboards with the power key in place of printscreen key. Absolutly Retarded!
that bad... I mean common... how would our keyboards look today if it actually mimicked all the shortcut keys in all programs? Which will eventually happen with those LCD keyboards with changeable keyboard glyphs.
For someone that knows how to type one usually do NOT look at the keys in any case so "Benj Edwards" is definitely pitching this to get a flame war going.
Anybody using all of the other keyboards in that list should clearly say that the C64 keyboard does not belong in the lineup.
No, no, he's just a standard troll, copy-pasted the text from somewhere and changed a few names ;) Hardly any effort at all. Googling for some of the phrases from that text turns up more copies, along with some other... educational websites. If you're into that sort of thing.
The Radio Shack CoCo had a moving keyboard, but it was nearly as bad.
Advice: on VPS providers
Back then, before cursor keys were standard, I got used to having to backspace in order to correct a writing error. Sadly, I still reflexively do that. *Sigh*.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
PC World did declare Vista the most disappointing product of 2007. So, I'll give them a pass on this heresy against the Commodore 64 ... this time.
Apple's current keyboards are the worst I had under my fingers since the C64...
-- The Online Photo Editor - http://www.phixr.com
I just love my new Apple Wireless keyboard. It's very thin and light. It uses so little desktop space. I can use it as a media remote. And the keys feel great. I've been programming since 1980, and I like this as much as the old IBM clickys. I do lose the home row, but that's very seldom, and a quick glance down maybe once a day, and that's fixed. My verdict -- it's great! They got the feel of the keys just right! I can actually type faster on that keyboard.
Nice to see that they managed to change the spelling of "Commadore," I don't see why they had to delete my post though. All it said was that Slashdot must be desperate for content if they're just dragging up any old bullshit they find in a user's journal and making it a front page post -- 10 worst keyboards? Come on. No one cares.
But apparently some administrator cared enough to actually eliminate my comment from the posts altogether! I wonder why? That's fine, I'll keep posting again and again no matter what the _real_ cowards do.
Coming from someone who has to use an archaic IBM AS/400 keyboard every day I can relate to this. What I would have rather see though is the top 10 worst keyboards of the last 20 years, if not 10 years. Not dinosaurs from a time gladly forgot. Also, the top 10 worse mice would be nice. I can remember using Apple's round mouse. God that thing sucked. It hurt too.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/categories.main/parentcat/11298
Apple's subnotebook came with a membrane keyboard whose guts were not sealed, and picked up dust and dander. No springs -- rubber gaskets. The keyboard circuitry was layers of plastic and rubber, and the dust and dander would end up in between them. The only way to keep my Duo 230 running was to remove the keyboard once a week, then clean each side of each layer.
Apple released at least six hardware revisions of this keyboard. I replaced mine three times, hoping to obtain one that was not fatally flawed, only to find that the improvements in each revision of the keyboard didn't solve my problems.
All this on a subnotebook designed for high-end customers!
I concluded that Apple's product managers were out of control. I bought no Apple hardware of any kind for ten years afterward.
Pi Ran Out
http://cgi.ebay.com/1987-IBM-Model-M-Compact-Model-1391472_W0QQitemZ280189607597QQihZ018QQcategoryZ74946QQcmdZViewItem/ (dunno the seller, its just the first link w/picture that google offered) shows some good pictures of one.
Mine still looks and works great with my Mac Mini.
Article: For reasons lost to history, Commodore built a horrifyingly terrible keyboard into the original PET, one that looked like something you'd find on a toy calculator. The cramped, unreliable, Chiclet-type keys
According to the "On the Edge" book, the calculator-style keys were used because Commodore was a calculator company at the time and wanted to cut costs by using existing inventory and factories. The founder was always looking for ways to cut costs. Although it burned them in the case of this keyboard, finding shortcuts is one of the reasons for the inexpensive price of the later Commodore-64 and the reason for the C-64 being the most popular computer model ever in the record books (based on units sold).
The founder was a cheap SOB (stereotypical Jewish, I'd have to say), but since the first micros came out, he always dreamed of being the Henry Ford of micros, and figured out how to crank them out like no other company could by wheeling, dealing, and shaving corners. The C-64 kicked everybody's ass in sales, at least until the PC clones become a commodity around 86-ish.
Strangely he was kicked out of his own company because investors and others wanted to do higher-end micros, which he faught against. They almost pulled it off with the Amiga, but PC-clone momentum was a little too strong. The Amiga almost became the "MAC of the masses" because of its multi-media capability, something lacking in early PC clones. Perhaps if they kept the founder (of C-64 fame), he'd find a way to make the Amiga cheaper, and history would be different...
Table-ized A.I.
I wrote my first commerical game on the Atari 400, and it got me into the games industry (straight out of college) in 1982.
It sucked, but it was all I could afford, and after a month or two I was touch-typing on it.
PC World missed the ISC Intecolor, though. Its keyboard *looked* okay, but it had "zero key rollover," meaning that you had to *completely* release a key -- *all* the way to the top -- before hitting another, or you got some random keystroke instead. Next to impossible to type on; the most efficient way was with a pencil, poking at the keys.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Dvorak?
They have also put two different Commodore PETs and another Timex Sinclair but still no ZX.
Like you said - they're a bunch of Americans.
BTW... those roll-ups don't quite have that same "cheap-rubber-blup-blup" when you press them as the ZXs did.
But I may be wrong, it has been quite some since I last used a Spectrum.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Wow, talk about a bunch of dumb@$$ PC monkies... all but one of the keyboards listed were out before there was even a standard form factor for keyboards. Though I agree with a lot of their choices, the C=64 was, by far, one of the best computers I ever owned. I typed on it constantly and didn't suffer from the idiotic mistakes that they obviously did. Perhaps they should have taken a poll instead of coming up with their list themselves (or did they poll the community for this? *ponder* I didn't see).
*shrug* I believe that idiot who didn't actually use these machines shouldn't be the ones declaring how bad they were... I have fond memories of my TRS80 MC-10 as well...
Enjoy! -Excalibur
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here. The C=64 keyboard and the BIOS screen editor rocked. The trick was you had to get used to typing with your right hand in a different position, but once you did, you had the arrow keys accessible without moving your hand halfway across the keyboard. If I could find a keyboard with the C=64 arrow-key-shift layout, I would get one today.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
The C64 had better sound and the Atari had a much better floppy
Could you offload processing to the Atari's floppy drive?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A gummy keyboard straight from the 80s.
Honorable mention on this list needs the ca. 1998 Compaq keyboards which had the space bar split and assigned backspace to the left hand half. While you could enter a special key combination to disable this it would turn it self back on at times and and you ended up typinsomethilikthis.
I finally pried off the keycap in frustration -- I'll bet it's still lurking in the back of one of my desk drawers.
Is it just me, or is it annoying that reading this article, it uses a a non standard control to advance from page to page? That it omits the standard "next" link at the bottom of the text where my focus and mouse will be as I finish each page?
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
I had most of these before I married and had my first kid, but the Mattel Aquarius was the worst ever. Even worse than the original PET keyboard. On the other hand later PCjr keyboard was actually my favorite of the early computers. It was very flat and had no wire. Plus I had a number of adventure games for it. I eventually made a power adapter for it with some electrical tape, nails, and the brick from an broken answering machine so I did not use batteries anymore.
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&q=ergonomic+keyboard&btnG=Search+Images
With their stupid non-functional F keys (you have to press "F-lock" at each boot. Great when you have to press e.g. "F8" at boot).
All the more annoying since MS and Logitech are the 2 main keyboard providers.
Are we talking about this keyboard? Because I'm fairly addicted to it now. I have big complaints, but I can't really go back to any other keyboard.
I'm faster on this keyboard than on just about any other I've used since my Powerbook keyboard. It doesn't take much force to press the keys, and they are low-profile, which makes it easy to slide fingers from one key to another (when typing fast enough for that to matter), but it does, in fact, give me good, solid tactile feedback. Despite typing lighter and faster than on really any other keyboard I've tried, it has a solid feeling that I can only describe as a "click" feel when a key actually goes down.
(Except, of course, there's not actually much sound. I'm much quieter on this thing than on my old keyboard.)
Which isn't to say that I love Apple for it. In fact, I dearly wish someone other than Apple had made this keyboard. It goes above and beyond previous Apple keyboards in bastardizations of common functions. I mean, obviously, there's the alt/super mixup (or option/command), which is what prompted me to start remapping it. But it goes farther.
Minor complaint: The F-keys are all shifted slightly to the left. I don't touch-type those, in general, but it is odd. And this was done to add an eject button, which nothing but OS X recognized out of the box. (Still haven't mapped that to anything.) The num pad is also minor, because I don't use it that much, but it is weird -- on a normal keyboard, plus takes up as much space as enter (it's double-sized, vertically). On mine, it's normal-sized, and just above enter. Minus, times, and slash have been moved clockwise to fill the space, and to make room for an equals key right next to "clear" (which is actually numlock).
I don't really see the need for an = key on the numpad. (And I'm not entirely sure what it's mapped to by default; I'll have to fix that.) But honestly, most calculator-type apps are going to let you hit "enter" (or "return") to find the result of an expression.
But these are really minor complaints, and they are kind of balanced by the coolness of having extra F-keys. Specifically, F16 through F19 where you would otherwise find LEDs on another keyboard.
Now, back to the complaints: No LEDs. Or rather, one: a Capslock LED, right on the key. But no numlock LEDs or scroll lock LEDs. This makes sense for Apple, I'm sure, as there isn't actually a key labeled with numlock or scroll lock. But on OSes other than OS X -- Linux in particular, which may not have numlock on by default -- it would be very nice to actually have an LED somewhere.
Now, the last keys that annoy me... Home, delete, end, pageup, and pagedown are all exactly where you'd expect them. Print screen, Scroll lock, and Pause are not, of course -- instead, there's F13, F14, and F15, but those are easy to remap.
But there is no insert key. And on Linux, I (used to) use the insert key quite a lot -- shift+insert is a common paste-to-terminal shortcut. And I don't mean that there's no key labeled "insert" -- the "clear" key, for instance, actually sends the NumLock keycode, and NumLock is the key I expect to find there, so all is well. But instead of insert, they have an fn key.
And it's a real fn key, just like on laptops, in that it's hardware-controlled. This means it's for turning F1-F12 into brightness controls, Expose, Dashboard, playback controls, and volume controls. (Or, if it's like my Powerbook, by default, the F-keys do all these things in OS X, and to make them actually send an F1 keycode to an application, you have to hold fn -- but this is customizable.) I don't mind having those available, but was there nowhere else they could've put an fn key? Was there nowhere they could've implemented this in software?
So, I actually have a completely un-mappable key on my keyboard, and it's pretty fairly useless. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to convince my OS to use those playback and volume controls, because t
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My vote goes for the Happy Hacking keyboard (the one with arrow keys) and the super-clicky old IBM ones.
It has to be the A1200 with a 2nd place to the A600 keyboard the A600 keyboard lost its keypad and that was important to gamers. The A1200 keyboard bankrupted commodore.
Commodore moved the keyboard controller from the keyboard to the A1200 main board and left a lousy ribbon connector in its place. This made it a lot harder than it needed to be to mod the A1200.
The A1200 had an ide connector which supported two drives (hdd and cd usually) however there was nowhere to put two drives and besides the Power ran through the main board. You could still mod it but it was messy or expensive. if the keyboard controller had been kept with the keyboard it would have made it easy to have an A1200 with hd, cd, a decent psu, accelerator board and a pcmcia slot which could have been used for networking or what ever. ok it wouldn't have been as open as an A4000, although perhaps a graphics card could have made it into the system via the trapdoor bus. A modded A1200 was a capable machine. Had commodore any vision for the future, they could have had enough revenue from this system to move away from the 680xx cpu's to the new PPC Cpu's.
Commodore wasn't just Amiga's and the C64 there were commodore PC's and surely they should have been viable.
The Amiga could have evolved it had a fanatical user base, who would have bought later generation amiga's had they been made.
Maybe an A1200+ Desktop system could have saved Commodore but that design choice to save a few cents on the keyboard controller would have meant a fully revised mainboard design and that just wasn't affordable.
which is why I believe the worst keyboard design belongs to the A1200.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
From the article: "Sinclair developed a scheme of assigning multiple BASIC keyword commands for each key, so users would have to press only one key (such as P for "PRINT") instead of typing out the entire command. Using the keyboard to type something that wasn't a BASIC command, however, turned out to be an exercise in frustration. Only masochists had any fun attempting word processing on the Timex Sinclair 1000."
I'm tired of this bashing of the Sinclar-family keyboards! Speaking as somebody who used one for over five years, I tell you that the multi-function keyboard was very efficient, at least for typing BASIC programs of course. Remember that all cheap 8-bit computers had to cut fabrication costs in items like cases, keyboards, power supplies etc; NONE of these machines had a decently built keyboard. With this economic constraint in mind, Sinclair solved two important problem: maximising typing speed for typical usage, and reducing wear-out of cheap keyboard components.
As for common text input, no problem because the ROM input routine was modal. The cursor would be toggled between several modes - it was a "K" for the main BASIC keywords or symbols, "E" for extended ones, "G" for graphics, "L" for letters, "C" for capitals and "?" to flag syntax errors in BASIC lines (an advanced feature, most machines would accept any input and only issue syntax error messages when you tried to run the program!). So you could type in any mode without continuous usage of SHIFT or other mode-changing keys. Another nicety was the embedded color-code input, made in "E" mode IIRC. Once you memorized the several functions assigned to each key, and got used to the modal system, you could type VERY fast compared to any other micro that also had low-wquality keyboards but required typing I,N,P,U,T,SPACE for INPUT and so on. (The Sinclair editor didn't require spaces; its BASIC pretty-printer inserted spaces as necessary... and these spaces didn't consume memory, like it happened with other micros, so people would resort to cryptic space-less coding like "FORX=0TO10:PRINTX:NEXTX", while Sinclair users very very porud that their BASIC listings were always readable with canonical spacing.)
P.S.: The model I used was a Brazilian TK-95, a Spectrum 48 clone that had a better keyboard, see photo and article here. This keyboard was among the best in this class of computers, I used it for 5+ years without any key stopping to work... even though I didn't program much in BASIC, in the end of the first year I was already hacking only in Z80 so I had to type stuff letter by letter. The keyboard was good enough for this and word processing - similar to the C64, but sans stupid layout problems. (I concede that the original rubber keyboard was bad for fast non-BASIC typing, like word processing.)
About the Timex Sinclair 2060...
Just to rub it all in, the unit had no Backspace key,
=
Ever looked at a Mac keyboard?
I was introduced to membrane keyboards like that on the Atari 400 as a nipper on the Magnavox Odyssey game console. They probably wouldn't have been quite so useless if they hadn't tried to mimic the offset grid layout of a traditional keyboard. Something actually shaped like a hand would have been better.
Those keys require a different kind of touch; a squeezey pressure feel not analogous to the tappity used for full-stroke keys. You don't type, you press. Something with that kind of touch could be useful as, for example, keys inside of shoes and intended for your toes.
While it certainly wasn't nearly as bad as some of the abominations mentioned in the article, Compaq used to ship this incredibly annoying keyboard where the spacebar was divided into two keys, one of which was the spacebar and the other was a second backspace key. I can't begin to guess how many extra typos that stupid thing gave me.
For me, at least;
The IBM DisplayWriter http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV9006.htmlkeyboard; excellent click, long travel, just about the best ever. Too bad you could only run MS-DOS 2.1 from 8" floppies on it... And the keyboard was repairable, though I think the key modules were like $8 each in 1989. And you can still gethttp://cgi.ebay.com/Digital-2683239-IBM-Displaywriter-Keyboard-630X-91-XX24_W0QQitemZ190174698129QQcmdZViewItem one!
I like my Deck 82http://www.deckkeyboards.com/boards.php a lot. Nice keys, no click, but the lighting is superb. Save that skull-and-crossbones keycap!
And of course the IBM Model M Space Saverhttp://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/categories.main/parentcat/9242, which I carried with me from one site to another for 8 years or so, changing cables, and saving space in those damned rack-mount keyboard shelves with no room for anything else but an M and a trackball. grrr... I gave mine away, and I miss it...
More? I didn't name all the best did I?
harrr. My captcha is 'entered'. cute.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I so missed the old Commodore 64 vs Atari 800 debates of my youth. Those of us who actually used computers back then would bring out every talking point and try to convince one another that our brand of computer (which was probably purchased as a result of a coin flip by our parents) was superior in almost every way. Nostalgia ahoy!
Fortunately we've moved on and no longer have useless brand loyalty arguments... oh wait.
Specificially, I know I use Win+R (run prompt), Win+M (minimze active windows), and Win+L (lock system) all the time. Equally useful can be Win+E (bring up a file explorer) or Win+F (which brings up a search dialog). Only "issue" I see with the Win+ combinations is that they're only available to the OS (not as a general meta to applications). On my laptop (which conveniently omits this key), I map the off-hand Alt key (left-handed, so the right-side Alt) to Win. Menu - I'll just right-click, thanks. Some agreement here -- I don't usually use it (as most of the time, the context items are available via different shortcuts anyway), but I don't begrudge its presence. On my laptop (which conveniently omits this key), I don't map it to something else. Num lock - Why won't this go away? Why do I need a way for my numeric keypad stop to working? Are the arrow keys hard to find? I find use for NumLock generally when playing games with my keyboard (the orientation of the keys is a nice straight-arrow setup for that). That being said, NumLock usually stays on for me (except on laptops, as the laptop implementation of the keypad is atrocious).
I'm surprised you didn't mention anything about poor old ScrollLock. Then again, Scroll Lock doesn't do much of anything (mostly speaking from a windows PoV here, I don't usually go key-exploring when I'm on a 'nix platform), except in Excel.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
... the keyboard/pad controller thing for the Atari 2600 BASIC cartridge. While it was a game console, with the BASIC cartridge it became something of a horribly painful to use and program computer. And the controller/keypad thing was the most atrocious thing in history, making all those keyboards on the list seem like outstanding examples of quality keyboards.
;)
http://www.atariage.com/controller_page.html?ControllerID=4&SystemID=2600
I still had a blast playing with it though. Someone gave it to me after getting a computer so I got my fix while waiting for my grandfather(HAM) to get off the Vic.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
This isn't fucking digg. Get this shit off the damned site.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's taken all these years, but this is the first time I've *ever* heard anyone say anything nice about the Adam . . .
The typical reviewer couldn't complete the review due to parts that just plain didn't work . . .
hawk
Gee all of this nostalgia of the 1970 and 1980 is scaring me. What about the worst fashions of that era? Polyester shirts, platform shoes and other eye sores. Remember that 1-MB for $100(at 1984 prices)? I wish to learn from my bad past and look forward now.
By that point, Commodore was widely perceived as a maker of toy and game computers, not business computers. The flashy graphics of the Amiga didn't help it a that point.
That perception meant that serious business software generally wasn't available early on, leading to a lack of business sales, leading to a lack of business software, leading . . .
hawk
I think we should include the old Thinkpads keyboards (like my old 760XL) along with these, the keyboard is not very comfortable, the Control key was swaped with the Fn key, so I end pressing Fn a lot of times, the keyboard is hard, sometimes I doubt I pressed the key right as you have to apply a lot of pressure.
This keyboard kills your fingers very quickly!
Those dumb reset keys were fairly common.
the original Apple ][ had it, right up there on the right end of the top row of keys. Eventually, it required a ctrl-reset to function, and there were a couple of hardware mods for that (and for lower case).
The Compucolor had the CPU reset key on the keyboard, although at least there was an escape sequence that could return to BASIC without flushing the memory (the Apple ][ had this, too).
The IBM PC took this to the other extreme, completely lacking an actual reset key, instead relying on not hanging hard enough for the software break to fail. Oops . . .
hawk
*Real* games use y, u, b, and n for diagonal movement :)
hawk
Thanks to rebindings, it's in a spot where it can be much more useful:
So why we don't have three keys in that spot?
One example is the Timex Sincliar 1000, it wasn't much of a machine and intended for Basic programming (not to mention Basic commands were the basis for its CLI), yet the author seems to think that optimizing the keyboard for those Basic commands is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. For a machine that was the cheapest home computer (and I don't believe that claim to fame has been taken away since), it was pretty good.
While many of those machines would have had simple word processing applications available, most of these machines were not intended for word processing. For the many people that used these machines, a very small number would have actually used them for word processing, and definitely not the levels of typing/word processing that we see today.
I don't disagree that some of these keyboards are awful, but the author definitely makes them seem a lot worse by comparing them to today's keyboards and keyboard usage.
There are quite a few modern keyboards that should be up there, and should have more reason to be there, especially with modern knowledge of ergonomics and RSI/OOS. There are a few people that point to Apple's new chiclet keyboard, but I'd also like to add the cramped and tiny sub-notebook (eg Eee PC) keyboards to that list too.
...at the time it was about what you could expect from keyboards in general.
The 2" height for the keyboard actually was ergonomic for the time, as it was in line with the habits of typists. Back then, mechanical typewriters were still quite common. The amount of pressure required to punch any given key was quite high, so you are supposed to type with your wrists off the desk in order to get enough leverage. Electric typewriters were built that also followed suit, even though there was no need to develop so much leverage. The good 'ol C64 was simply following the crowd.
Today you can get by with typing with the pads of your fingers instead of needing to punch down with your fingertips. The result has been a trend in "low profile" keyboards that are easier to use.
Then: IBM Archives - Typing Posture
Now: Proper Posture & Ergonomic Tips
FWIW, the C128 featured a more low profile design than it's predecessor, reflecting how computer keyboards changed how we typed in the 1980's.
As for the extra symbols and keys - You needed those. The C64 was aimed at programmers as much as end-users hence the design decisions, but finding one for the unfamiliar could be quite a chore (e.g. where the F--- is "WHT"). Plus some games put "Run Stop/Restore" to good use.
However, the cursor keys were an abomination. An inverted "T" on that keyboard would have been very nice indeed. Even the #1 worst pick from this list (The PC Jr.) had for distinct cursor keys.
Memorex 122-key (see http//www.xs4all.nl/~bjdouma/memorex-telex-keyboard.png), which has
a tremendous orgastic feel, and my Sun Type 5c (with keyclick!), both of which I presently have hanging off
Linux box through selfmade adpaters.
I built one when I was a kid. Hated the keyboard so much I bought an old surplus TRS-80 Model I keyboard and interfaced it instead of the membrane kbd of the Timex.
Actually worked pretty good too. Although, after I got my Vic-20, it spent most of the time in the top of my closet.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Best. Keyboard. Ever.
Seriously - it uses the same Alps mechanical keyswitches as the original Apple Extended Keyboard (I hear you can wash those in the dishwasher..). None of this mushy dome-switch crap, the keys snap down with authority and a crisp, loud, proper CLICK. Virtually identical to the old Model M (they use a buckling spring but the feel to me is the same). $150 but well worth it; I went through three Apple keyboards in two years and have had my TP for three, still as great as ever.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
How about any keyboard that has Power, Sleep and Wake Up keys where the PrintScreen, Scroll Lock and Pause keys are supposed to be?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
PC World is a good candidate for one of the '10 worst web pages' about the '10 worst keyboards'. What a piss-poor stupid clunky 'having to scroll everywhere' web page.
(correction: it was a "Kaypro", not "Keypro". There's other typos, but they are not brand names.)
Table-ized A.I.
I've ranted on this before but for the life of me can't find my original whinge.
http://i3.iofferphoto.com/img/1139040000/_i/10421992/1.jpg
Take note of the home / ins / del / page up / page down keys and how they've been moved around by Microsoft for reasons unknown, breaking the standard US form factor we've been using for years (and hell! I had to convert from UK in the first place)
Also take note of F1 F2 F3 / F4 F5 F6 - they've split the F keys by 3 not 4 and they require an "F lock" to be enabled for them to work as default, otherwise they serve other functions (it should be the other way around)
Finally the cursor keys are slightly lower down on the keyboard itself.
Absoloute abominations and very arrogant of Microsoft to boot, sadly they come with many cheap PC's - gives me the absoloute niggles.
This one http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/03/199228 was the worst I've ever used. I had to send it back after a couple weeks of getting nothing done but hitting the backspace key.
Remember when Dilbert's company shipped a keyboard without the letter 'Q'... the article didn't even mention this however.
I suggest you read Slashdot
BUT, the ADAM had natorious quality problems with its fast tape system. They never did fully overcome them, and folded.
This is actually not true...not in a technical sense. Absolutely all the hardware issues and the main software issues were in fact solved in the final "R80" revision of the ADAM (which I had). The tapes wore out a bit quickly but the issue was way overblown because of the early unreliable drive design that tended to eat tapes. Also, by the time the R80 ADAMs were in stock you could asl get a proper floppy drive.
I seem to remember that Commodore tape drives were not tremendously reliable at reading tapes, and were waaaay slower, and that didn't stop C64 from being a hit. Commodore had its own struggle with the reliability of the 1541 drive too. Commodore, however, wasn't distracted by other product lines and resolved the problems quickly, plus the C64 console itself didn't have as many serious problems (units arriving DOA, etc) in initial release...most notably, Commodore made sure reviewers didn't get faulty machines, and when Commodore announced a product would be out at a specific date it came out pretty close to that date, whereas the ADAM was months late.
First impressions are lasting impressions, and a corporation has to have the presence of Microsoft to overcome bad first impressions. Coleco really didn't have what it took to sell the ADAM.
Any review of awful keyboards that can't find space for the ZX80 (which was so bad that my Dad sent it back and bought a BBC A instead) is not worth it's salt.
Sorry, I had an ST. What were you Amiga folks saying there?
Is that crappy keyboards are cheap and disposable, whereas the IBM is built like a tank. And when you hit a key on the IBM you know you've hit it. It's a very positive feeling, with a very definite and known press point; you don't have to guess whether you've managed to cause a letter to appear on the screen. Geeze, you would have gone nuts in an office in the 1950's!
I can also tell you that mine has suffered a number of violent incidents when the pooter decided to be unco-operative, including hands smashed quite hard on the keys. I was sure it was a gonner a few times, including once when my office flooded from above, but after a drying out period it was fine. I figure this thing is getting close to 20 years of age with no sign of fatigue. And yes, it's the same reason I listen to my music on a Pioneer SX-650 receiver from 1978 feeding a pair of B&W Series 1 Matrix 2 speakers from the early 80's: Rock solid build quality matched with performance (sound quality) which blows away anything but the most expensive equipment today.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
I find using ToggleKeys in the Windows' Accessibility Options to give me an "up-beep" when caps/num/scroll lock keys engaged, and a "down-beep" when those keys are turned off again.
Hugely convenient!
YMMV.
Actually the rearrangement of the home/end etc keys has been returned to it's true home in most of the newest Microsoft keyboards.
The F keys very based on the keyboard quite a bit. For example my MS keyboard has only one split: F5/F6.
I'm actually happier with this keyboard than any previous keyboard. One of the reasons for that is that the wrist support actually works for people with longer fingers (like me). Most keyboards (and mice) seem to be designed for people with hands like my wife: one full joint shorter than mine in all fingers.
meh
The Spectrum was pretty bad, but the version reviewed looks wonderful compared to the one my family owned.
The keys were rubber, you had to do hand-gymnastics to enter a command (you can't type P-E-E-K, you hit down the symbol shift key, the shift key and press the O key) and when the computer heated up the rubber keys felt weird.
But the article's wrong - there is a backspace! You hold down symbol shift and press 0 (zero). Not convenient, but it exists.
And what about the ZX-80? Those thin membrane keyboards were atrocious! Still, with a full kilobyte of programmable memory you felt you were living in the future!
The more common usage (as far as I'm aware) is frustration, though American Heritage says "A keen feeling of mental unease, as of annoyance" where Webster's amplifies that it's "...caused by disappointment" and dictionary.com says "French, possibly from dialectal French chagraigner, to distress..."
But I've heard it used in the sense you cite.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The ZX81 (or Timex Sinclair 1000 in the US) did at least have slightly matt finish keys. Its predecessor, the ZX80 had smooth, flat, membrane keys. And they were blue, with white lettering.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I've tried a lot of them. Chicony, Adesso, etc. They all have awful keys, and their batteries tend to run out right in the middle of a redtu...um, important 'business meeting'.
I now have a DiNovo Edge, which rocks hard, though it is a little heavy, but completely rocks in most every way. The best feature is the round touchpad scrolling...You just start sliding your finger in a circle and it keeps scrolling as you circle. It could use some more customization features in the software, but it also has the rockin 'disable CAPSLOCK' built in. The only other issue I have with it is that it would be nice if you could easily use the KB while it was charging (ie. just a plug in, or a plugin option) rather than having to vertically dock it.
I'm really looking forward to the DiNovo Mini Logitech just announce, that a mini KB with the same round touchpad it looks like.
http://blog.slaingod.com
If I had to pick one for this list, I'd go with the Panasonic Toughbook 30. That thing is not easy to touch type on. You really have to deliberately press each individual key firmly.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
cannot believe the zx doesnt get a mention.
http://www.vintage-computer.com/sharppc1251.shtml
Dreadful in the extreme.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=987
Pretty bad as well, since it is alphabetically arranged.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=560
This is quite possibly the worst color combination in human history.
But in terms of usability, the Atari 400 was by far the worst. I had one and the lack of ANY feedback as well as the fact that speeds of typing over 5wpm were impossible rendered it the single hardest computer to EVER type on.
Oh - and the delete key didn't have a repeat function. And they annoying fake click was like some water torture. click click click click click click click.(souded a lot like a beep actually). Imagine your PC speaker's startup beep at half volume every time you press a key.
It wasn't the keyboard itself so much as the entire package - AND that the Atari 800's keyboard was one of the best at the time. The panalty yo paid for buying a 400 over an 800 was even more severe than the PC Jr was compared to the PC.
For example, right off the bat, for the Commodore 64: "The computer's anti-ergonomic 2-inch height made it extremely hard on the wrists of untrained typists."
One of the best typewriters ever, the IBM Selectric, had a higher keyboard than the Commodore 64 or any of teh other devices shown. The hight of the keyboard has very little to do with its ergonomics, and a high keyboard does not strain your wrists. Desks have a greater than two inch variance in height, and desk chairs can be adjusted to match.
What will cause problems is a keyboard with a "wrist rest", or a too low profile keyboard that encourages you to pick up the bad habit of resting your wrists on the table as you type.
Not that I'm going to defend the chickenhead 64, it's got plenty of issues without making new ones up. I'll take the C=64's keys over the ones on my Macbook Pro any day.
I still have the 300 baud internal modem card in my jr, you insensitive 1200 baud clod! :)
In all seriousness, without my parents buying a jr when they came out, I doubt I would ever have started out in the computer industry, let alone still be working in it. That PCjr, as much as it doesn't get used any more, is NEVER EVER getting thrown away.
As keyboards go, I'm actually amazed that the chiclet keyboard topped their list! It wasn't nearly as bad as many of the others on the list. The jr's keyboard didn't kill it. The chiclet keyboard was great for schools (it is VERY easily washed) and the alternate keyboard was actually very, very nice to work with. Two things killed the jr as far as I'm concerned: 1) The sheer, absolute dominance of the C64 at the time, both in price and capability, even though it came out earlier. 2) the continual bashing the jr got for supposedly not quite having the same graphics capabilities as other PCs, even though it could do all CGA modes, most EGA modes, and a few modes that were way better than some of the EGA cards at the time.
God, I had an Aquarius, and I guess the only thing that made it #3 on the list, rather than #1, is somewhat adequate space between the rubber keys.
I learned to program on that thing, with a "massive" 16KB expansion unit, and I even had it running amusing (to me, having my first computer) little games I got from magazines and adapted to its bastardized BASIC, or the few that I brewed up myself. I never got too attached to any program, as the tape drive system was notoriously unreliable -- I would often back up the same program to multiple tapes, and STILL not be able to read back any of them a few months later. Also the only printer available was a 40-column (4 inch) thermal printer that printed in BLUE. I couldn't even do my homework on this thing because I couldn't produce full-page width documents.
At least I got it as a gift, and I'm pretty sure my father got it mighty cheap. Fortunately I got my first PC about two and a half years later, a daisy wheel printer not long after that (dot-matrix printouts were verboten in many of my classes), and got on a fairly normal computing path. Even 360k floppies were quite a blessing after dealing with cassettes for so long!
Still, there are machines NOW out there with worse keyboards than these -- but such are the compromises inherent to pocket-size devices. The only excuse for 70's-80's computers was cheapness.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I have a solution for Caps Lock that can be easily done on a short-term basis, with no keyboard driver hacking.
Pop the key off with whatever is handy -- a bent paper clip will do if you're not carrying a pocketknife or screwdriver -- and wrap a rubber band around the stem of the key. Then put it back on. It may take a couple tries, but you'll find that this means the key has to be pressed REALLY HARD to activate it. Depending on the rubber band you've chosen, and how tightly you've wrapped it, you could have to stand up and LEAN on it, but you should still be able to activate it if required.
When the job is done (assuming this isn't pretty much your machine exclusively), pop the key back off, remove the rubber band, and put the key back on. Nobody will be the wiser.
My work keyboard is modified this way, but my setup pretty much ensures nobody will want to use it. If the Dvorak keyboard isn't intimidating enough, the mouse on the left screws almost everyone up. If someone can touch-type, they can just change the keyboard settings once logged in (and the login sequence is still in QWERTY), or log into another account which uses standard QWERTY, but I have a spare QWERTY keyboard hiding behind the monitors attached by USB just the same. The mouse they just have to deal with. Reach across and remember to reverse the buttons.
I also have both monitors rotated into Portrait mode, but this doesn't cause any usability issues. It does rule out the use of ClearType, but very few people in our office give a shit about that -- they're still trying to figure out why running at the native resolution of the LCD panel is such a great idea.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Back in the mid 1980's I attended a PC show where a large number of different IBM PC/XT "clones" were on display. Many of the manufacturers had added a few special purpose keys to the otherwise typical IBM PC/XT keyboard layout.
My favorite among them had a "Reset" (reboot) key just above the Escape key. Perhaps the designer had a premonition about the future release of MS Windows ?
At least in 4 out of 10, the left Control key is where at should be. Not like on modern keyboards.
When IBM released the extended 101-key keyboard, based on the Model M, why did they keep the Num-Lock key, or at least, use the same driver for the 101+ keyboard that they used for the original Model M and use the Num-Lock part only for smaller keyboards? Num-Lock is completely useless on an extended 101+ key keyboard, and there's no reason why games shouldn't be able to read the keyboard the same way the standard keyboard driver does (actually, I always thought the old PC method for reading the keyboard was kind of absurd; Commodore did a much better job, despite the limitations). More over, why don't the people who write todays keyboard drivers for Linux and other operating systems treat the number pad on a 101+ key keyboard like Apple does; if the Mac detects a 101+ key keyboard, Num-Lock, while recognized, does pretty much nothing. I know the Num-Lock is a critical tool for smaller keyboards, like those on laptops, which is why Apple still recognizes the key, but why rely on ancient, obsolete drivers to support large, powerful keyboards, and cripple the functionality of the number pad in the process?
I had a commodore 64 back then, but knew no one else with a computer. I was, though in the heat of the ST vs. amiga... had both, liked amiga better
I find it ironic that after all these years the business dolts still don't get what was wrong with the PC-jr.
Sure, the keyboard was bad but it wasn't so much the keyboard which was quickly fixed but the fact that the machine was intentionally technologically crippled in order not to compete with the more expensive parent. Remember this was back in the day where the letters IBM actually meant something. That type of airline niche marketing might have worked but they crippled the one thing (other than the display) that even the most ignorant buyer would understand - the keyboard. If IBM, the maker of the best electric typewriters in the world intentionally made a such an obviously crappy keyboard - what did that say about the rest of the components. So when the geeks recommended other machines (as we did en masse...), people listened and the rest was history. The IBM mystique was gone forever - and attempts at this type of crude technical crippling were abandoned - or more correctly, became more subtle.
So it wasn't so much the keyboard, but what the keyboard revealed about the philosophy that killed the PC-jr and squandered so much of IBM's goodwill in the personal computing industry...
One of the worst keyboards I ever used was the original mini keyboard that shipped with G3 iMacs. Many of the keys were in weird, or non-standard places (arrow keys for example). I spent time at a computer lab with them once and hated every minute of it.
The so-called 'chicklet' keyboards Apple makes now I adore. I quit using my expensive Tactile Pro and purchased the latest Apple keyboard. I type far faster on it than any other keyboard, and had absolutely no learning or adjustment curve.
As a touch typist... As the saying goes: "The day Microsoft produces something that doesn't suck, it's gonna be a vacuum cleaner". Well, the "natural keyboard" is NOT natural at all for a touch typist. Those retarded engineers managed to put the '6' key on the wrong side of this 'split keyboard'. I won't mention that it's not a mechanical keyboard neither etc.
;)
Honestly you don't know if you have to laugh or cry. To me it just exemplifies perfectly all that is so wrong with that company, that has always been producing profundly and stupidly misconceived crap.
Basically for a touch-typist it's unusable and, no, I won't "train myself" to change the way I touch type
I ask because the issue with children's toys and wall paint is that children tend to put things in their mouths. That is where lead is harmful. Handling it isn't that dangerous, certainly the small amount need to paint characters onto a keyboard wouldn't harm you even if you ate the keys whole.
Oh, I have two keyboards, one where the characters are almost completely gone and the other pristine. They are the same model. The difference? One is in my office where I don't have food, extranous dirt, etc. The other is in my shop where dirt and dust are ever present. If you want to preserve that new keyboard look...clean your hands before using it and blow the dirt and dust off of the keyboard!
best!
Huh?
???
"We could pause and resume movie playback simply by holding our palm in the air, or control a cursor by waving a fist at the screen. Selecting options can be achieved by giving a thumbs-up. It's not as easy as, say, using a remote control, but it is very cool indeed."
So, I guess it won't be long before the enigmatic, Lexu-matic Qosmio G45s will tote their lappys onto buses and plans and look like real fu or kung fu fighters. I can see Tarantino furiously penning (waving?) a script now...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You know, Atari's basic wasn't exactly great either. You usually ended up resorting to peeks and pokes just to get some semblance of speed out of it - but then, that was part and parcel interpretive basic in general. And for the record, the C64's character graphics were terrific and easy to program. Player/Missile graphics.. Uhhh, not so much. BUT, all you'd need is a look at 'Rescue on Fractalus' or 'Blue Max' on both machines to realize that there are advantages to both architectures.
.1 seconds. That was in 1984, and it was about then that I realized MHz might just matter.
I actually purchased a compiled basic called, 'Action Basic' which was just awesome. Came on a cartridge and was fast, fast, FAST. I actually coded an antialias routine for graphics modes 9 & 11 using pseudo-code I found in a Byte magazine article. It took me a few hours to debug my creation and then all of about 3 seconds to execute. Then my friend showed me up with his Mindset computer (look it up), and his performed that code in about
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."