Two-tone design (grey/white)

[stalepie]

Hi... when did two-tone colorways fall out of favor with keyboards? Was it around the mid-90s when IBM Model Ms were becoming less common?

I know it's common with modern mechanical keyboards, but most cheapo rubberdomes sold in the last 25 years seem to adopt a 1 color look, which never feels right to me. I like the white/gray look that IBM seemed to standardize and wish cheaper keyboards would go back to that, because it makes sense to separate the modifier keys from the alphanumeric ones. (Doesn't seem like it would be much more expensive to continue this design even for cheaper boards).

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With some of Cherrys boards, for instance G80 and G84 lines, they once had the attractive two-tone design, but then dropped it for a monochrome all-white or all-black look, which looks too busy and clustered to my eyes.

Anyone agree?

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[Hypersphere]

Yes, I much prefer varied colors on a keyboard for aesthetics and demarcation of functional zones.

I also prefer the keyboard case to be a contrasting color to that of the alphanumeric keycaps.

[fohat]

I dislike single-color schemes.

IBM's pearl/pebble combination looks spectacular with almost anything, and their "industrial" green/gray/brown - whatever it is - was also a triumph.

[depletedvespene]

I agree with you; a two-tone layout is way better; alphas one color, mods and navs other color, and the F row forming the one exception (with its division in three subclusters... which is the only reason for it; in, say, an AT layout, the F keys should all be mod-colored, as indeed is the case).

There is one thing, however, that I always felt was wrong: the numpad — the + - / * keys are not mods, so they should have never been mod-colored. My own current numpad shows how, IMNAAHO, it should have looked like ever since the Enhanced layout was released (where it comes to colourway; the other changes seen here are a different issue).

Numlock with the proper colorway. YMMV,

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[stalepie]

Hmm, yeah, I can see how the +, -, *, / keys are not "modifiers," though their placement as a cluster on the right, it makes sense to me to differentiate them by a darker shade. It's context-sensitive, because it's already spaced away from the modifiers (and maybe it provides a visual balance to the dark/light/dark/light scheme).

Glad to see I'm not alone in preferring two-tones though! Just makes sense... too bad it went out of "style."

[zrrion]

I assume they are mod coloured to indicate that, unlike the rest of the numpad, those keys are not effected by the numlock. It is also an aesthetic thing I suppose.

[depletedvespene]

I assume they are mod coloured to indicate that, unlike the rest of the numpad, those keys are not effected by the numlock. It is also an aesthetic thing I suppose.

I always thought it was an unadvertent carryover from the earlier layouts (on the AT and XT, the only non-mods that existed in that row/colum were + and -, and that was itself a carryover from the earlier terminal layouts, where Field+ and Field- were, indeed, mods).

OTOH... the Num Lock was something that should have been moved away and eventually gotten rid of, anyway. Heck, on my keyboard, I have it on Shift-Scroll Lock (as the SSKs do) and the base key is reassigned to produce a much more useful '=' character; meanwhile, the 2U + character was split into two - the top half remains + and the bottom one has become Tab. And yes, I swapped the respective keycaps on yesterday's picture, for the photo (as keeping them as they normally are would have distracted from the point I was making).

[Findecanor]

(Doesn't seem like it would be much more expensive to continue this design even for cheaper boards).

I think that single colour scheme was indeed a cost-saving measure for some keyboard manufacturers making cheap rubber-dome keyboards:
1. It let one complete key set be moulded in one shot.
2. In some factories, keycaps were mounted by hand (by low-wage workers...) and then the keys were printed all at once. Having the keys all the same colour would have reduced the risk of getting a different colour in the wrong place. F and J often also had a different or rotated stem so that only those keys could fit there.

I assume they are mod coloured to indicate that, unlike the rest of the numpad, those keys are not effected by the numlock. It is also an aesthetic thing I suppose.

I would say that the keypad is patterned after calculators, which often have different-coloured keys for digits and operators. In a typical calculator's window, only digits and the decimal point are visible; whereas operators are not.

[Hypersphere]

Yes, monochrome was yet another cost-cutting measure for keyboards. I am still perplexed about how people have chosen to cheapen the all-important input interface to the computer -- the keyboard -- yet they might spend $1000 or more on a video card.

[zslane]

Uni-color schemes can be elegant if some design thought it put behind it (e.g., Apple's Snow White design scheme). But then NeXT gave the world all-black machines, including the keyboard, and the rest of the world saw it and decided it was so kewl that it had to become the next, monotonous de facto standard. We've been paying the price for that ever since.

Multi-color is, IMO, far superior to uni-color, but dual light-gray is just plain boring and not much of an improvement over a thoughtless, uniform white or black aesthetic.