What about big iron - various PDP8, PDP11, Marconi TAC
etc.? Do console
switches count as "keytops"?
The Philips P850- has red and green toggles for the 16 bit data entry
register, arranged in blocks of 4 (i.e. each hex digit is all one
colour). The corresonding lamps have red or green filters too (I've not
seen multi-coloured lamps on other frontpanels, but I am sure the P851 is
not unique in this respect).
What about early electronic calculators - IME86 etc.? Lots of those used
colours for various key functions. Stretching it a bit to call them computers,
There's an HP9810 alongside me. It has white-beige keys, grey keys, dark
grey keys, pale yellow keys and orange-yellow keys. Is that a computer?
The internal architecture is much the same as a computer (it's a CPU
connected to ROM and RAM memory), it is user-programmable.
though (at least for the earlier machines - I'm
with Tony in that some of HP's
"calculators" were far more like general-purpose computers)
I fail to see how any reasonable definition of 'computer' would exclude
the HP9830, HP9825, etc.
-tony