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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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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.
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.
Believe me, having owned the Atari 400 (my first computer), at that time; I would've given my right arm for a keyboard that good!
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...
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Despite its height, the C64 keyboard wasn't that bad. Sure, typing on it gave me much more finger strength than I really needed (and the nickname "the claw" when typing on softer keyboards), but the extra symbols on the keys weren't confusing and the oddly placed keys (inst/del & clr/home) were much less irritating than some of the PC keyboards I've used with a skinny vertical return key or the NeXT which put the pipe/backslash over on the freaking keypad.
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.
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?
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No they havent.
Given the newest keyboard from Apple shipping with the iMAC line. It looks sexy but it royally sucks to type on.
I also anyone to dare find someone that even mildly likes their laptop's keyboard.
That said, the WORST keyboard ever was on my ATARI 400 computer. Holy crap who in their right mind ever though a membrane keyboard was usable? the atari 800 at least was decent to type on....
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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.
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OTOH, I really like an unintended consequence of the Windows key. I've got a MS "Natural Multimedia" keyboard where the Windows key shoves the left Alt key over to where it's comfortably positioned directly under my left thumb. Since the vim editor ships without any Alt combos premapped, all of them are free for me to customize for may favorite commands and macros. I get easy access to a couple of dozen of my most frequently used commands while barely moving any fingers. (Most importantly, I mapped Alt+F to replace the infamous ESC mode switch.)
The truly stupid thing about this keyboard is Microsoft's brain-dead idea for the "F-Lock" key, which replaces all the function keys with bogus new fixed function keycodes like "Open" and "Send". The keyboard comes up by default with the function keys disabled, and there's no way to switch the mode via software; you have to physically press the F-lock button to switch modes. I had to find and install a special script to make Linux reinterpret the stupid new keycodes as regular function keys.
...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.
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The Apple ][ keyboards were great when I was 10, but trying to type on that mini keyboard now is nothing short of painful.
After reading this article, I'm pretty sure the person who wrote it never used any of the machines he's bitching about. I think he just saw pictures of them and drew conclusions from that.
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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.. :)
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// Looking back, the C64 was really a lesson in marketing--there was technically superior competition out there on all fronts except sound
Yes, a pity what happened to the Commodore marketing department...
When they finally had a technically superior machine (the Amiga) they completely dropped the ball on marketing.
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I really like my MacBook Pro's keyboard - it's clacky, fairly loud and definitely isn't squidgy.
It seems they're a bit uneven in nature (I've seen some horrible complaints about MacBook Pro keyboards which just don't match up with mine), but I imagine the less-than-wonderful ones are still better than the new iMac keyboard. Which is truly, truly awful - I got one with my iMac, along with a Mighty Mouse, and soon switched to an old Compaq effort with an adaptor and a Logitech mouse with a ball in it.
My dad, however, absolutely loves the castoffs. Weird.
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When they finally had a technically superior machine (the Amiga) they completely dropped the ball on marketing. As I understood it, the real problem was that their upper management didn't have any vision whatsoever, so presented with the best personal computer to date (arguably better in nearly every way that Moore's Law couldn't solve than today's systems), they just didn't see the advantage. Toward the end, they ported a Unix to it and actually made some headway on using it as a real computer. That would have gone somewhere had they had a little more time. They needed a new line that wasn't associated with games as much, and a year for the marketing to take.
Had they done it right, we'd all be running Linux on our Amigas today.
Side story: I was once told to write serial communications software to make a VAXStation running VMS talk to an Amiga running AmigaDOS. I began with the assumption that, under a real OS like VMS (which was not developer-friendly, but at least had all the high-level services one might expect), I would be able to finish quickly, but with the crude AmigaDOS, I would need more time. So I did the VMS side first. That took nearly all of the week that I had allocated, so I was scared when I hit AmigaDOS... and discovered that AmigaDOS was indeed shockingly primative... except for the fact that it was running on hardware that made everything I'd ever need available as firmware routines. Heck, you could do triple-indirect semaphores in firmware on that beast! It was a joy. I finished on time, and then forgot a file on the media that I send the code out on, so the demo tanked
They feel just like any normal scissor-action laptop keyboard to me.
Yes, the 1541 had a 6502 micro and some RAM in there. You really could make the 1541 do it's own processing. Some disk copier programs could even load themselves resident on the disk drives (if you had a pair of them) and then you could disconnect them from your computer and shut the computer off, and the drives could still make copies.