RE: XyWrite and TeX

[Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxx]

>> This is wholly alien to me. I know it's an old canard, but going back
>> to the mid-80s, why and how did IBM put over the change from the XT
>> keyboard to the AT (the removal of the function keys on the left and
>> the putting of ctrl and alt in absurd positions).


>I miss the Royal Standard keyboard from the mid-1950s, which had an
>elongated tab key about where the return key would turn up on electric
>models. You could hit it with your palm. I miss it but I don't expect to
>see it again. And for sure I don't spend any time whining about it.


I'm not a touch-typist, and my (PC) experience with keyboards doesn't go back beyond the current
standard (I did start out on a mainframe terminal with a keyboard dedicated to text manipulation...I
miss it). But I know of a keyboard "quirk" I think has to be the worst yet. Compaq
"dumped" on our company (we had a supply & maintenance contract) a bunch of keyboards
with a split spacebar...with the left half being a backspace key! You COULD change it to a space key
with a complicated maneuver, but it would always revert at reboot. Untold man-hours were spent
searching for a way to make "space" the default and when it was determined to be
impossible the whole lot was dumped in the trash (for some perverse reason I actually salvaged one).
It was impossible to use without constantly deleting last characters...sometimes you'd
notice...sometimes not.

-Brian H.