At 09:54 AM 97/11/30 -0800, you wrote:
Actually, what you might imagine to be a small beam
isn't all that small.
Go to radio shack and buy one of their little IR-viewing aids sometime.
(Or use a CCD camera to look at the output from your remote; CCD's
are quite sensitive to the near-IR.) Most have a beamwidth at least
60 degrees wide, and all work quite effectively if you point them
backwards but at a white wall :-)
This is standard practice here at home, we play with the thing quite often,
i.e. at the wall, the ceiling, from under a blanket, at our finch, etc.
On the PCjr I found the range to be quite poor, and one had to be right in
front of the system unit in any case. Across the room operation was next to
impossible.
I would guess that the IR keyboards in the PC Jr's
pretty much guaranteed
that they would never be adopted by schools. When all you have to do
is point your keyboard at the teacher's PC and type "DEL *.*", any
schools that did buy them must've unloaded them as soon as they could...
This was an option, albeit it came standard. A keyboard cord could also be
used, as I recall. I sold my PCjr in 1989.
I still have technical manual, if anyone's interested.
Kevin
---
Kevin McQuiggin VE7ZD
mcquiggi(a)sfu.ca