On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: That is a hard thing to determine. I'd say that shape and feel are both important, as the shape of the keys can enhance speed and accuracy almost as much as having a good mechanism. Indeed. I kind of like the IR keyboard and it seems to work better than what the press let on, but it does seem to eat batteries (at least the chicklet one, not sure about the enhanced keyboard). I wouldn't want to type a paper with it for sure. Still, I imagine this is probably a matter of asking the right questions for a market survey. What, if any, detail was the focus group privy to when the compromises to the keyboard were asked about? Did they follow up afterwards? Seems like they probably didn't and just ran with it. The PCjr is kind of a neat machine in its own right, but I have to think that it is caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, IBM wanted to capture a chunk of the emerging home computer market, but on the other hand not cannibalize sales from the more expensive (and more expandable) IBM PC. It obviously had a couple of things going for it over the PC (graphics and sound capability), but it was also more or less priced basically smack-dab between the Commodore and Atari 8-bit offerings and the IBM PC itself. In a practical sense the memory limitation made it about as powerful as a C-64 or Atari 8-bit machine when accounting for tradeoffs in custom chip capabilities vs a less powerful CPU in the case of the other 8-bit rivals. Most of the design compromises for it vs the PC seem rational, with the exception of using BERG connectors for everything, which is nonsensical to me. Well, that and the fact that IBM didn't offer upgrades for a full 640kB RAM. I'm sure that the latter would have made it a bit more palatable to people since the vast majority of PCs weren't sold with 64kB ( or 128kB for that matter). From what I can tell, the DMA restriction isn't too much of a problem in practical use, with the exception of the serial port), so with just the additional memory it probably would have enjoyed fairly good software compatibility with its big brother.