
PC Keyboard: The First Five Years - soheilpro
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/pc-keyboard-the-first-five-years/
======
Stratoscope
> _That the function keys (only F1-F10) are organized in two columns on the
> left is a comparatively minor difference._

Minor to you maybe. Not minor to anyone like me who baked the two column
layout into their user interface! What was I thinking?

[https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1983-11-rescan/pag...](https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1983-11-rescan/page/n201)

~~~
cerberusss
That is amazing! Are you the author of the software? Amazing scan, and the
comment is fascinating: "Editor's note: the figures accompanying this article
are screen dumps from a monochrome display".

~~~
johnnycab
>Amazing scan, and the comment is fascinating

There is an entire Byte magazine archive, which will either blow your
nostalgic mind, bring a smile or just make you ponder ─ how much/what has
really changed?

[https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine](https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine)

~~~
cerberusss
Wow, I didn't know that archive.org was so high-quality. You can just flip
through the pages. Extremely well done, I've blocked an evening just for going
through that -- thanks for pointing it out.

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bluenose69
Does _anyone_ like having CAPSLOCK to the left of A? Indeed, does anyone ever
actually use CAPSLOCK? I loved the CNTRL to the left of A that I grew up with,
and have remapped to get that position, ever since. I don't think I have ever
used CAPSLOCK; I've used upper-case several times in this, and I simply hold
down the SHIFT key while I type ... doesn't everyone do that?

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I use caps lock anytime I have to capitalize more than 3 characters in a row.
I just type way faster with it on instead of switching between the two shift
keys.

~~~
dmd
I've been typing for 35 years and in all that time I don't think I've ever
once touched the right-shift key.

~~~
jbarberu
Impressive to write for 35 without needing to capitalize any of
"qwertasdfgzxcvb"... ;)

~~~
dmd
The thing is - I have more than one finger on each hand.

~~~
kwoff
I only use left shift, too. I think it's just that right shift is way over to
the right compared to left shift. Though I did take a proper typing class in
high school, so I wonder how I managed to get away with that... :)

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projektfu
I feel that moving the fn keys to the top was a mistake. The use of fn keys
with the AT keyboard was natural and for me an extension of touch typing. On
the top row they are hard to hit accurately and lose their utility.

~~~
jolmg
A good thing about their being on top is that they allow for a smaller laptop
form-factor. Of course, back then that was probably not the intention.

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smnrchrds
I have a tangential question: why were × and ÷ not included in keyboards and
ASCII standard?

It would make sense for them to be. For one, they already have + - = < > %
etc. It would make sense to add signs as fundamental and as frequently-used as
× and ÷.

Also, some of the signs that were included do not seem to be remotely as
important. Do we really need 3 different quotation signs (" ' `), 3 bracket
styles ({} [] ()), 2 different newline characters (CR and LF), and various
somewhat obscure symbols and many more non-printable characters? It doesn't
seem like the address space was too small and they had to make hard choices
about which symbols to include. It looks like they had all the capacity they
could have wanted, yet decided not to include × and ÷.

Does anyone know why?

~~~
pdw
ASCII was designed for typewriters, not video terminals.

"×" is the same as "x". "÷" can be made by overstriking ":" and "-". The
quotation marks needed to also function as accents, by overstriking: "ë é è".

CR and LF are separate operations on a typewriter. You might want to simulate
bold type by sending CR and retyping part (or all) of a line.

[ and ] were added for the benefit of Algol, and other programming languages
with an Algol-derived syntax. Though it was recognized that these characters
were less essential, and these code points were left undefined in ISO 646, the
international version of ASCII. This is also why the brackets were put in the
alphabet part of the ASCII table, in other countries these code points
would've been used for letters that weren't part of the English alphabet.

It was anticipated that some manufacturers would use a 6-bit subset of ASCII.
(Even 5-bit and 4-bit subsets were considered.) This would mean that the lower
case block would be collapsed on the upper case block. So they needed to find
characters that could be useful but would still make sense when rendered as [
and ]. Hence { and }.

Hope this helps. A lot of thought went into ASCII, but many of the
considerations became obsolete during the 70s. And you could say that any
terminal that does not support overstriking, does not properly support ASCII
:)

~~~
gumby
> It was anticipated that some manufacturers would use a 6-bit subset of
> ASCII.

Not only anticipated but quite common on 36-bit machines where you could put
six characters in a word. In those days “byte” meant a contiguous string of
bits so a byte pointer could point to one, two, ... 63 bits in some
architectures so SIXBIT characters were not at all inconvenient

> You might want to simulate bold type by sending CR and retyping part (or
> all) of a line.

Some video displays (“glass teletypes” — these took character data and were
not pixel addressable) supported this feature. Printers pretty much all did —
tolerances were not great so overprints were always darker. Backspace (^H) was
used for this too. This is one reason why backspace and delete have been
different characters to me.

Note that the 0xFF value for delete goes back to paper tape: it punched out
all the holes in a column so could overwrite any other character. Yes, you
deleted by doing backspace delete.

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osullivj
Loved the Model M [1] keyboard supplied with PC AT and the RS/6000\. A
colleague had one recently; we had to rig it up with a DIN/USB converter. Then
it was a pleasure to use, but very loud with its clicketty clacketty action.
Let everybody know that I was hammering out the code like unrolling a carpet!
So instead of getting an old Model M I bought a Corsair K70 for my home rig.
Great solidity and tactile feedback. Audible too, though not as loud as the
Model M. Recommended for old school devs like myself who want that 80/90s
keyboard feel.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard)

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red_admiral
I once worked on a UNIX machine that had F keys at the top, but a separate
block on the left with keys for things like cut, copy, paste, save, close etc.
I found this incredibly useful and I wish it were still a thing, it saved a
lot of time when I was working on documents where I could keep my right hand
on the mouse, and use the left one to press these keys with one finger rather
than have to "chord" Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V etc.

I realise this is what the F keys were originally meant for, but somehow we
never standardised on them in the way that we did for e.g. Ctrl+S = save.

~~~
Snortibartfast
That was probably a Sun machine. I used it them at university and liked the
copy/paste-keys too.

I had a PC keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle 2) for a while which had this setup
with copy/paste as separate keys. Unfortunately for me, these keys were macro
keys which sent "CTRL plus the key at position three on line two" etc, and
since I use dvorak layout, the C,X and V keys are mapped to Ä,Q and J, which
meant "cut" became "quit" (CTRL-Q).

I don't know how Sun handled this, if the edit-keys sent some specific keycode
that the program interpreted like "cut" and not just "CTRL-X"?

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dmix
> Ctrl key is where Caps Lock is now and Caps Lock is where the right Ctrl key
> is now

Vim users concur

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kadoban
Wouldn't vim users put Esc where Caps Lock is instead?

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apersom
I have caps lock mapped to ctrl when holding the key down and esc on tap.

~~~
1996
I do the same with enter, as I like having 2 control keys! enter is control
when held down and enter on tap.

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cannam
I hadn't realised the first iterations of the PC keyboard used the tall Return
key even in the US layout. I wonder why they changed it. (In my view the tall
Return key is far nicer to use than the little flat one)

~~~
chadlavi
Same. I wish I could find a US-ISO hybrid keyboard.

~~~
hakfoo
The Cherry G80-8200 is sometimes available in that layout, although newer ones
went full-ANSI.

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symplee
What do you think the _last_ five years will look like?

And when do you think it'll happen?

~~~
weinzierl
There is still no input methods that beats touch typing in speed _and_
accuracy. In my opinion the only serious contender is voice input but
considering the time needed for corrections it is still not there.

When it comes to ease of use this is a completely different story though...

~~~
zozbot234
> There is still no input methods that beats touch typing in speed and
> accuracy.

Stenotyping. It's also a win if you're prone to developing RSI (which is a big
problem, specifically for touch typing).

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chadlavi
It's from before I was born but I know and miss the 1984 layout. Give me back
that fat enter key!

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agumonkey
what about non IBM keyboards ? I remember seeing wildly different keyboards at
my father's job.

