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.

Comments

No need

[NotBornYesterday]

Pfft. Deletee kye? I never usses taht aneemore.

Re:No need

[flyingsquid]

Making the "Delete" key larger isn't a bad idea. But since Windows is still the most widely used operating system out there, maybe they should make the "Control" and "Alt" keys larger as well...

Re:No need

[walt-sjc]

Waaay back when, in the days of the glory of DOS, I transitioned a programmer from a terminal to a PC. He only had one arm. When telling him how to reboot, his response was "Oh that's just fucking great." He had to use a pencil in his mouth.

Caps lock will be the end of unintended shouting

[Vandil X]

and, more importantly, reduce calls during your off hours because a user locked out his/her account due to CAPS LOCK being on when entering a password.

Location, location, location

[neapolitan]

I am happy to see some thought go in to "routine" matters like this -- too often I feel that laptop keyboards have abominable designs, such as shrunken space bars and control keys, miniscule arrow keys, or nonstandard placement of arrow keys, etc.

However, I would say the esc enlargement on my Lenovo is unneeded -- its location above the other keys means it is struck accurately. I would venture to say the same for the delete key, which I could locate with my eyes closed by its characteristic placement. I think the aesthetics of the vertical extension of these keys is going to be negative.

For my money, I wish they would just lay off the IBM keyboard design. Thinkpads should not have a Windows key. :)

So conflicted...

[XnavxeMiyyep]

Lenovo has adware in their updates, but they might sell a laptop without a caps lock key! It's like they're simultaneously the worst and best computer company at the same time.

Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin

[corsec67]

Yep, the key to the left of "A" should be Ctrl. That is one think about the OLPC XO-1 keyboard I like. The actual keys are crap, though.

They had laptops or typewriters with function and modifier keys in the 19th century?

Nineteenth Century

[Speare]

Show me a keyboard that even HAD the Delete or Escape keys, idiot. Hell, when I learned to type, you had to use a lowercase L for the digit 1, and a capital O for the digit zero. Exclamation point was "apostrophe, backspace, period."

Re:Nineteenth Century

[MichaelSmith]

Show me a keyboard that even HAD the Delete or Escape keys, idiot. Hell, when I learned to type, you had to use a lowercase L for the digit 1, and a capital O for the digit zero. Exclamation point was "apostrophe, backspace, period."

You had backspace? I had to disconnect the carriage and slide it to the left.

Re:Nineteenth Century

[Animats]

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.

caps lock

[Bitch-Face Jones]

is cruise control for cool

Re:caps lock

[CyberDragon777]

mOD PARENT UP!

Re:HERE'S AN IDEA

[Goldberg's Pants]

This is a ridiculous story as HP already messed with keyboards.

Try checking out the HP laptop keyboards on Canadian laptops. Dear god the layout on those things is terrible. The old QWERTY stuff is in the right place but punctuation etc... Is all over the place. Absolutely horrendous keyboards. I wound up having to use a USB keyboard with it as the default keyboard is damn near unusable unless you like doing a LOT of deleting and retyping of stuff.

Re:HERE'S AN IDEA

[countertrolling]

HP/Compaqs are probably the worst computers on the market today. I don't know why anybody would buy one. Horrible quality control and service, no XP drivers for any of the newer units...UGH! Lenovos are probably my favorites if for no other reason than the mouse "track point" nub thingy and they're still easily available with XP. I hope they tinker with smaller price tags some day.

Marketing Gimmicks & Flawed Analyses

[xixax]

So let me get this straight.

The best way to improve keying accuracy is to create even more derivative keyboard layouts?

I'd guess the del key might even afford to be *smaller* as it is used more often and hence more easily remembered.

I would have had a bit more sympathy if the article had said they'd placed it in a more accessible location ala space bar (rather than off to one side of the main keymap).

Maybe they could create a "Lenovo" key to sit between the "Windows" key and a new "Dave was here!" key. Then I can loan them my 16 button hexdecimal mouse[1].

Xix.
[1] Otherwise known as a digitizing puck

Boffins?

[IceFoot]

Lenovo has boffins? What the heck are they, creatures from Lord of the Rings? Some kind of exotic bird? Wait, the dictionary says it's BRITISH SLANG. Well, you can just keep your esoteric BRITISH SLANG over there on your little island, buster, because we don't need no stinking BRITISH SLANG over here in America, or the rest of the world for that matter. If you can't write in standard English so English speakers around the world can understand it, just press your DELETE key (no matter what size it is) and go do something else. *grumble* damned Recoats *grumble*

Re:Boffins?

[Cimexus]

America doesn't use the word 'boffins'? That's such a 'regular' word (to me) that I never even realised it was slang. (I'm Australian but have lived in America for quite a while - never occurred to me you guys didn't use that word). Well you learn something every day.

Sure enough though, you are right (according to Wiki). And the fact that most of the hits you get on Google if you search for the term are .au or .uk sites.

Having said that, I think it's pretty obvious what it means given the rest of the sentence. Plus Slashdot often uses US slang (or not even slang, but US words which have other equivalents elsewhere) all the time in headlines, but that doesn't trouble the rest of us (too much). Context is your friend.

Re:Incomplete statements

[elashish14]

By the way, who constituted what they refer to as "people?"

Vi users of course.

Re:Lenovo aren't the only ones

[DirePickle]

Oh, man. There is nothing I hate worse than typing on than one of those Logitech keyboards that shuffle that whole block around. I can never find the home or end keys!

Caps Lock Idea...

[Evil Shabazz]

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
/
COMMIT

Re:Caps Lock Idea...

[patro]

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
/
COMMIT

Well, if you have a proper editor you don't need to type those keywords in caps, because the editor does it for you automatically.

Re:Caps Lock Idea...

[dizee]

i'm a senior software developer at a LAMP shop; i write a lot of SQL for ad-hoc queries and what-not. i capitalize SQL queries, even in my ad-hoc queries (it's a good habit to get into if only for readability), but i don't ever use the caps lock key. it is more efficient for me to hold down the shift key (which is closer to my pinky than the caps lock key) while continuing to type at the same pace than it is to stop and press and release the caps lock key. i suspect this is likely the case with most people who are able to type at any reasonable pace.

so, your example fails to convince.

the only reason i can see for keeping the caps lock key is for old and/or braindead systems that don't speak anything but uppercase.

Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin

[Tumbleweed]

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. :)

Please think of the forum junkies

[fragMasterFlash]

On behalf of myself and all the other forum junkies can we please get a larger, ruggedized F5 key?

And make intended shouting much harder!

[jonaskoelker]

Caps lock will be the end of unintended shouting

I would like you to meet my friend, Khassaki:

<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key
<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> fuck me

(From http://www.bash.org/?835030)