The 10 Worst PC Keyboards of All Time 612
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.
Power Key next to Enter Key (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Interesting)
TI99/4a (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny this just came up (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
the keyboard is real (Score:1, Interesting)
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...
Re:Apparently... (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the newest keyboard [apple.com] 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....
... and the ZX80? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Windows Key" anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The worst keyboards _I_ ever used... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:My first computer was there (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Power Key next to Enter Key (Score:4, Interesting)
But I think Microsoft is the winner here: their Wireless keyboard makes F-keys do stuff like forwarding mail and Undo/Redo. There's an F-lock mode that makes them do the right thing, acting like regular F1-F12 keys, which are used in every advanced application or game. But at the same time the Print Screen key starts switches to send the Insert keystroke. So to make a screenshot, you have to
1) Press F-Lock
2) Press Print Screen or Shift+PrintScreen
3) Press F-lock again
And these keys are placed "ergonomically" (read: you have to find them every time before using).
All of us "old timers"... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Man..the memories of being a tech in a basement.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:C64 was a testament to good marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Apparently... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:C64 was a testament to good marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
When they finally had a technically superior machine (the Amiga) they completely dropped the ball on marketing.
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
Re:My first computer was there (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yabut (Score:3, Interesting)
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.