deskthority

They are quite impressively long legs. Certainly longer than mine.

But it's not a beam-spring, and the 5251's keyboard has a certain charm in that it looks a bit like a VIC-20. Albeit one with 3" of armour plating.

Ah, think I've identified the swivellicious terminal: it seems to be a 5291-2, which also seems to imply the famous "Bigfoot" keyboard.

I thought it was a bit early as I'd just sort of randomly assumed it appeared with the PS/2 or thereabouts, but maybe this thing was its origin? Anyway, as much as I love the buckling-spring keyboards, even more than 30 years later I can still remember the awesomeness of typing on a beam-spring.

Yeah, that's the creature! My back hurts just looking at. The swivelly things in the other office looked like this, but must've been some twinax equivalent. I guess that'll be a Model F keyboard, it's too little for a beam-spring. https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/images/e/e7/IBM_3178_182457871926-1.j...

Slightly longer wait than I'd expected, though far from the longest! Though it may be worth me cancelling and resubmitting assuming I don't just end up having to pay a bunch of bank charges anyway... hopefully the transaction will simply be cancelled with no further faffing about. But, y'know, banks...

The layout seemed to make more sense on a large IBM system but just seemed insane on the PC. Even at the time it looked weird. Never used a 3278; would've been nice paired with a System/370 running VM which was actually a pretty decent interactive system, especially compared to bloody TSO. Didn't ch...

It worked out to USD$145 in total including postage (base set, modifiers, UK ISO kit, arrow keys and black spacebars) with a US$10 discount, though as I forgot to use my credit card my bank will sting me with a bad currency rate and a foreign transaction fee. And then I'll also get hit with import V...

It's strange that we're now at a time where desktop computers and CRT monitors are considered "vintage". Funny how quickly things move on. That office I've pictured was still quite unusual for the time in that nearly every desk had a terminal and/or PC on it: the only reason the "U" of desks next t...

Damn you both! I've had to do a pre-order. :D Impulsive, me? I guess I'm still sore that my 19" rackmount cab turned up broken and I can't console myself with more shoes as they're already spilling out the wardrobe and I've already been snarked at for making the bed look like Pratchett's luggage wit...

The lack of mice / pointing devices in front of Vometia’s displays gives me the same tinge of dread so many people had back then, when face to face with a computer. “How do I even use this thing?” By knowing all the magic spells, of course, you imbecile. I think I did have a pointing device for the...

My office looked similar - except we usually had those typical fabric dividers so you didn't have to stare at the ugly faces of co-workers (a considerable improvement). Oh, yeah, we had lots of those in the immediate vicinity too. It's just that our bunch got rid of a lot of them in the immediate v...

Oh yeah, I saw the elvish thing when I was looking them up. If they must insist on being made of unobtainium, I guess at least I can slightly console myself with having used proper beam-spring keyboards when they were still in active use. Even though I had no idea at the time of how special they wer...

@vometia: It took me a surprisingly long time to understand, how it was possible, that modern notebook keyboards became acceptable. One factor was certainly - people with long fingernails. Now that I know, that you sport properly maintained nails, I can - with good conscience - recommend a keyset w...

Oh, I recognise those terminals! Never could figure out who made them, they were rebranded by everyone. This one had a Philips badge on it. https://vometia.com/images/stuff/philips.jpg My desk in about '91-ish, complete with thoughtful observation about the meaning of life from one of our ops. Quiet...

I've always been a rancorous old fart, even when I was (technically) young. Parents were born during WW2, gf's dad actually grew up then and was an evacuee. And then a nuclear physicist, which was a new and exciting thing back then rather than today's "that's something we can buy from China because ...

Unfortunately, most of the games modding tricks are Windows-only - and I hate Windows and refuse to ever use it again. Yeah. I can't really argue with that and I do object to paying the "Microsoft Tax" to game on something I can mod. But on the other hand I have such a love of generally interfering...

I thought that was a popular opinion. Everybody seems to like Half-Life 2 more. I thought Half-Life was great, but found Half-Life 2 very annoying and limiting. You can't kill your own guys?? Why the hell not? Even more annoying were the artificial barriers and a feeling like you have to follow one...

I feel young again!

"Best" in what sense, exactly? In American English it's customary to say, for example, "April first, nineteen ninety nine." So I would write "April 1, 1999, or 4/1/99" when writing it informally to be read as text. In a more formal context, especially for an audience that includes folks from other ...

Modern games are all just generic boring slog fests designed to get money out of you after you already paid for the game. Some of them are, particularly the tactic of paring away bits of content to sell as day one DLC and eleventy billion rehashes of the same game. But in general terms I'm still a ...

:D Awesome. For a second I thought that was actually legit considering some of the stuff I've seen. Even now companies are still making "for women" stuff, even including medical equipment, which is the same as the stuff for... well, it's never described as "for men", curiously, but the only differen...

Mine haven't had curry but they have had the occasional beer: I did say I was clumsy! The SSKs recovered but the newer (and flimsier) Unicomp M eventually died. Shame, because it had quite a crisp keystroke, rather surprisingly given its rather insubstantial build. Maybe 2004 was just a good year, o...

Random comment about spherical vs. cylindrical which is that it may have been at the behest of the typists. I've mentioned on my MX Black Impressions topic that the gf borrowed my keyboard with the SA profile and didn't care for it. The main reason is because she has long nails which would catch on ...

Actually she has noticed! That's why I was asking about lubricants, but it's sounding like it may be more troublesome than that. Bugger. :( I'm currently back on the canard à la citron vert as I've had a stressful week and constantly having to think about the modifiers on the Poker was just too much...

I'll need to decide which would be the most irritating between using fn to get at the ` key or at the escape key, as I also use the latter a great deal in both editing (I'm a vi type) and video games. Of course I could just add a new XCompose sequence to accept esc as a valid modifier... Good tip ab...

Dead keys: yeah, that's what I was thinking of! Still don't like them. :D gf's name has an "è" in it so it's kinda awkward to type now, the key sequence being (with AltGr as my compose key) AltGr - fn/Esc - e. It's now as bad as e.g. the Portuguese fondness for "ã" which is also fiddly to type. Fort...

Just quickly (I'm knackered and off to bed even though it's not yet 7pm: up since 4am and a "challenging" day) the ¬ thing is/was popular with IBMesque programming languages; PL/I maybe? I forget offhand as I'm just a C pleb and even that and its antecedents like BCPL and related have gone through v...

I have it back again as she wasn't entirely convinced so she's nicked my, erm, canard à la citron vert. I may or may not get it back. So in the meantime I'm the one trying to get used to the Pok3r in its 60% glory. Pros and cons. It is very cute and theoretically it ameliorates the RSI-inducing natu...

Right, back again, still sans keyboard: she seems to have warmed to it a bit more now we've discovered how to employ the otherwise totally bloody useless caps-lock as a second function key, and to utilise the somewhat obliquely-named "layers" as a sort of edit-lock. I'm curious to see how she gets o...

Her impressions are that she likes it but is less enamoured with the position of the function key. Dunno what to do about that: my first thought was to remap it using xkb until I realised "oh yeah, can't do that!" so... dunno. She'd prefer it to be where the hateful Windows key is. There are some sw...