Best keyboards you've used ever!

Am 26 Aug 2004 9:05 meinte Mark Wickens: Oh, that's simple, it's the SIEMNS low profile terminal keyboard, introducted with the series 975x termainls. While I kept the old terminal (*1,*2), I had no problem, to say good bye to the old, almost 2 inch high keyboard. The layout was basicly the same, just as flat as todays keyboard. Second comes of course the original PC-D keyboard, which was in fact a striped down version of the 9750 design with way less keys ... only some 125 or so. After that? No real lovable keyboard came along. Well, the 8160/9750 keayboard had over 140 or so keys (I have to count them). It was _rightsized_ roughly you had 5 areas: 20 localy programmable keys (each for 16 char) on the left, next the alpha section (as allways) followed by what could be called the cursor block ... But unlike today, it was made up of _24_ keys with separate functions. Next was a numeric block, mostly like todays PC-Keyboards (except, again it was 19 different keys). Above all a row of special functions, message handling keys, short message keys and function keys (again some 20 keys) was located. It is just a dream. I men, let's take just the simple left tab key, mising on todays PC - how easy table handling is, if such a _dedicated_ key is available. Not to mention all the oter cursor controls. The term full screen editor becomes a complete new meaning. Arround 1986 I added a little controller to attatch the Keyboard to a PC, but there where to many programms working with low level scan codes and such to make it worth. Maybe today, it could be possible to reach again the level of comfort we had 25 years ago. Yeah, did I mention that I'm talking late 70s *G* Gruss H. *1 - Hey, after all it was a real vector display, so an 'A' was made up from 5 straight lines, and not a cloud of glibberisch pixels. *2 - Well, and in fact, just because the new terminal was based on a micro processor instead of a TTL graveyard didn't make anything better. The 8160 slicer did in fact interpret the screen codes as a programm code and produced the desired effects, which resulted in some nice features, never seen again in other machines. -- VCF Europa 6.0 am 30.April und 01.Mai 2005 in Muenchen http://www.vcfe.org/