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Lenovo Tinkers With Larger Delete and Escape Keys
Slatterz writes "After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have decided the time is right to install larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range. While it is a small change, it is fairly radical to tinker with an area of hardware which has been largely unchanged since the 19th century. What convinced them to make the size-change was doing some tests on users to see which keys they use the most. They found that on average, people used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys that Lenovo hasn't made any bigger." The article says Caps Lock may be next on the agenda; death is too good for Caps Lock.
I have a Lenovo T400 and the placement of the DEL key always annoyed me. I use a program called KeyTweak (http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/) to remap my lenovo keyboard as follows:
Right CTRL key is DEL
Those silly keys to the right and left of the up arrow are HOME and END
And finally, drum roll please... the CAPS key is mapped to the TAB key so I have a gigantic space to mash my chubby fingers when looking for a tab stop!
I don't care much about the Delete and Escape key changes mentioned in TFA... but I think the article's author gives a glimpse of tech-naivete' by suggesting that the Caps Lock key is obsolete. Just because he doesn't see a reason for Caps Lock out there in his little business world doesn't mean the key isn't highly useful to application developers. I'll point out SQL capitalization standards as just one example.
DELETE FROM my.memory WHERE opinion = his
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Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
I'm using a Dragon 32, you insenstive clod
I've been collecting vintage computer hardware for the last few months, and I gotta say, my Tandy CoCo3 (128K version) has by _far_ the best keyboard of any of the 8 or 16-bit machines I've used. I never used one back in the day, so the mint condition one I just got last month _really_ surprised me with the keyboard feel. I also got a Tandy 102 that was still in its unopened box. :)
Back to the subject of keyboards, though, to say noone has been messing with the layout of keys is to be completely unaware of computers of the last several years. Certainly there's a small player in the industry called 'Microsoft' that has been making some fairly commonly found keyboards that have the keys normally found above the arrow keys to be arranged in strange and remarkably unpleasant ways. I'm pleased to say the latest entry in their 'Natural' line has returned those keys to the proper position - the MS Natural 4000 keyboard not only unbreaks the keyboard layout changes they made in previous keyboards, but also returns the tilt to the correct location - the front, not the back (which actually makes things WORSE ergonomically). Plus it's available in beautiful, beautiful black. :)
You had backspace? I had to disconnect the carriage and slide it to the left.
Ah, yes, life before backspace erasure. Keypunches. Flexowriters. Baudot teletypes.
I have this Teletype Model 15 keyboard. (That exact keyboard; the picture in Wikipedia is of my machine. Yes, I need to machine a new space bar.) Each key has a travel of about half an inch, and produces not just an audible "click", but a "whir-chunk" as the keyboard encoder, which is a mechanical device with cams, does a parallel to serial conversion. There's a speed limit; once you've pressed a key, you can't press another one until the encoder is finished. There is no key rollover, but you can't push two keys at once because the encoding mechanism prevents it. There are 32 keys, since this is a five bit code and they're all used. There are two shifts, FIGS and LTRS. The keyboard just sends those; it itself has no notion of shifting.
There's one unused key, the "blank key", which sends the all ones character. My software for the machine uses that as backspace, typing a "/" followed by the letter just deleted. The machine itself has no backspace capability. So you can't backspace too much, or you hit the right margin, for which I delete the whole line.
This is 1930s technology. There were printing telegraphs and stock tickers back to 1870, so electrical keyboards do go back to the 19th century. Edison had a machine with a semicircular keyboard (not for ergonomics; the keys radiated out from the center of a round machine). Linotypes (which, amazingly, appeared in 1886) had entirely electrical keyboards, with separate keys for upper and lower case letters.
Teletypes loosely followed the Underwood typewriter layout because the Model 12 Teletype (the first one that worked well enough to deploy, from 1921) was a heavily modified Underwood typewriter. Computer keyboards since then have a direct line of descent from the original Morkrum Model 12, through decades of Baudot machines, and into the ASCII era.
It's bad enough listening to people talk on their cell phones, I don't need to listen to them talking to their laptops too.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.