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.

Well...

Kabz found the 10 Worst PC Keyboards of all time which leads off with the Commadore 64 and take a trip through PCjr country. Might trigger some nostalgia, or some sort of flashback wrist strain.

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...

Re:Well...

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...

Re:Well...

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!

I don't know...losing an arm would balance out a better keyboard in my opinion.

C64 was a testament to good marketing

...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.

Re:Well...

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.

Re:Well...

typing on it gave me much more finger strength than I really needed (and the nickname "the claw" when typing on softer keyboards)

Now come on...that isn't really how you got the nickname.
Be honest.

Re:Well...

Ah, a fellow caps-lock hater. I customarily pop off a bunch of keys on my keyboards. It gets me a few odd looks at work, but it saves me lots of hassle. If I truly need one of those keys I can use a pencil to activate it. Here's the rest of my hate list:

Insert - I've never had a use for "write over mode." Has anyone?
Windows - Almost useless, squeezed between useful keys. Fortunately my Linux systems ignore this key.
Menu - I'll just right-click, thanks.
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?

-Jon

Re:Well...

Windows - Almost useless, squeezed between useful keys. Fortunately my Linux systems ignore this key.

You can bind it to something useful like META.

Menu - I'll just right-click, thanks.

And take your hands off the keyboard?

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?

How do you move diagonally with the arrow keys?

Re:Well...

Caps Lock can be quite useful with exotic keyboard layouts. The best example of which I could think is the standard Swiss layout. It accomodates all the accents and umlauts for Switzerland's four official languages and an awesome shitload of special chars most people wouldn't even dream of having on a single keyboard (ranging from $, £ and to , and ).
To accomodate all those functions, several keys have three, some up to five(!) functions (example: Normal: ü, Shift: é, CL: Ü, CL+Shift: É, Ctrl+Alt: [). There's also discrete umlaut and accent keys (e.g. Ctrl + Alt + , then Shift + E for É).

Long story short: Some languages require more characters than US-ASCII and some layouts have been built to provide those with CapsLock as a modifier.

Re:Well...

Its really good if your about 14 and are really insecure on a forum. :)

Mind you I believe most people when flaming hold down shift as opposed to using caps lock.
Might be a intelligence thing....

Apparently...

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.

Re:Apparently...

What I find odd is that Apple's newest keyboard is just a modern rehash of the IBM PCjr chicklet design, and yet nobody I've talked to has made big complaints about it. Honestly, the thing is worse than a rollup USB pocket keyboard, worse than those little laser-on-the-table keyboards, worse than typing through one of those plastic grease-shield membranes on a cash register, and yet, because it's done by Apple, it's gotten a free ticket to reinvent the chicklet without an uproar.

I'm typing on the new Apple keyboard as we speak. I actually voluntary upgraded to this keyboard from the previous model because I didn't like the feel of that one. It's nothing like the PC Jr chiclet keyboard -- the keys have excellent feel and it's easy to type fast. It would be better if the keys had a least a little bit of depression in the middle like the older iBooks and PowerBooks, but I much prefer this model to the last Apple keyboard.

Is it bad??

Is it bad that I own 6 out of 10 of these keyboards and am looking for the other 4 to complete my collection?

Power Key next to Enter Key

There is also this keyboard (image) [nuxx.net] 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.

Full text of article

10. Commodore 64 (1982) [pcworld.com]
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) [pcworld.com]
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) [pcworld.com]
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) [pcworld.com]
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,

Backspace

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!

Funny this just came up

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?

Like the list... Hate the page!

I'm writing my own article on worst navigation by a Web site. This PCWorld page will clearly be number 1 on my list.

... and the ZX80?

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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

The worst keyboards _I_ ever used...

...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.

disagree on some points

I have to disagree on a number of points, that I think could've been researched better:

• The "nonstandard keys" complaint about the C64 ignores that back in 1973 when the C64 was designed, there was no standard. You can't be "nonstandard" if there isn't a standard. Even the IBM 8086 keyboards where "nonstandard" by that definition (check here [colindiponio.com] and here [uncreativelabs.net] for examples)
  
• Snide remark: The vast majority of C64 owners didn't do "real work on daddy's IBM PC" because daddy didn't own a computer at all back then. We were the first generation with computers at home, for the most part.
  
• The constant whining about the lack of backspace ignores that on many of those machines (I don't know all of them, so some might work differently) the delete key actually worked as backspace when you were at the end of a line.
  

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"?

Re:How about the best

I still use IBM keyboards at work and home due to their durability. True story -- IBM used to market the keyboards to banks (like the one I work at) as a productivity enhancer...the loud audible 'click click click' has been proven in usability studies to improve data entry by 3-5% since its another feedback response (audible) to a potential error. When I mistype on an IBM keyboard, I *know* I've mistyped.

I also like the fact that I can bludgeon someone to death with it, if worse comes to worst.

Can also be used as a weapon.

"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.

Re:"Windows Key" anyone?

The key steals valuable space from the spacebar (no pun intended).

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.

Re:The sad truth about cmdrtaco

But remarkably thorough for a troll, don't you think? You can tell he really put some effort into that one.