deskthority

Microswitch Hall Effect switches, yes?

zslane wrote: Microswitch Hall Effect switches, yes?

Wiki says yes.
wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

SD series, so...

Dingster wrote:

ramnes wrote: But how does it feel?

>Most of the switches feel super smooth and the spacebar is like butter.

... consider yourself really lucky JP!

HP 264x series terminal keyboards use hall effect sensors.

legalize wrote: HP 264x series terminal keyboards use hall effect sensors.

I haven't encountered that particular terminal, but my experience of c. 1988 era HP terminals is that I would avoid anything with the HP name at all costs. As a bit of background, the factory I worked at for my summer job while studying replaced their ageing IBM System/3x (can't remember what it was but the one with the really incredibly heavy twinax terminals: beamsprings and clunkers!) with a then new HP mini. The new system was very much slower than the ancient IBM mid-range it replaced and the terminals were something else: the forms-based stuff was glacial and the keyboards were made of horrible flimsy plastic that would creak and groan constantly. I can't swear to it but I think they may have also suffered the sticky keys thing if you didn't strike them perfectly straight. Absolutely awful.

HP are an incredibly nasty company anyway and by all accounts really horrible to work for. I guess I'm fortunate in that I resigned from DEC before Palmer had completely trashed the company but according to the people who remained it went from bad to worse once HP finally took ownership. Then again, HP are the company who killed VMS because they didn't understand what to do with it so they deserve nothing but contempt. Messrs Hewlett and Packard, the original dotcom shysters.

vometia wrote:

legalize wrote: HP 264x series terminal keyboards use hall effect sensors.

I haven't encountered that particular terminal, but my experience of c. 1988 era HP terminals is that I would avoid anything with the HP name at all costs. As a bit of background, the factory I worked at for my summer job while studying replaced their ageing IBM System/3x (can't remember what it was but the one with the really incredibly heavy twinax terminals: beamsprings and clunkers!) with a then new HP mini. The new system was very much slower than the ancient IBM mid-range it replaced and the terminals were something else: the forms-based stuff was glacial and the keyboards were made of horrible flimsy plastic that would creak and groan constantly. I can't swear to it but I think they may have also suffered the sticky keys thing if you didn't strike them perfectly straight. Absolutely awful.

HP are an incredibly nasty company anyway and by all accounts really horrible to work for. I guess I'm fortunate in that I resigned from DEC before Palmer had completely trashed the company but according to the people who remained it went from bad to worse once HP finally took ownership. Then again, HP are the company who killed VMS because they didn't understand what to do with it so they deserve nothing but contempt. Messrs Hewlett and Packard, the original dotcom shysters.

I have one of those keyboards and they're nothing like the terminals of '88, these are a decade previous and as removed from the visually striking but awful stepped keys of the later keyboards. I know that HP in recent years is not the same company as back in the day, certainly their modern offerings are junk. I hate them for acquiring Compaq's unnatural love of Torx fasteners along with everything else from that festering carbuncle that somehow managed to acquire the splendor that was Digital, even if Digital couldn't make a good keyboard to save their lives (if anyone knows of a better DEC keyboard than the OEM Fujitsu Peerless boards, I'd like to know about it. I'm curious to know what the VT05 used as in my experience it's Stackpoles all the way back to the VT52 "DECScope"). They kept the fucking Compaq name alive and DEC dead, killed off everything useful or interesting DEC made and basically stopped introducing innovative products of their own. I've been scrapping out horrible desktop PCs of late, and several HP machines have this hilarious thing called the "Personal Media Drive Bay". It's a USB-B male in a box and sometimes a barrel connector, tied into the main board's USB and the power supply's 12v rail, respectively. That's it. Oh, and for no good reason they made it take its own, weird bay in the computer instead of fitting it into a half-height drive bay. This is always mounted in the way and is fucking huge and uses a lot more metal than it should, not in quality of construction but in stupid, giant flanges. I have no idea what this thing is for or what they were going for beyond a slightly cleaner implementation of a twenty-something-year-old standard. Or perhaps it's a way to charge a whole lot extra for a laptop drive in an enclosure...

Red_October wrote: I have one of those keyboards and they're nothing like the terminals of '88, these are a decade previous and as removed from the visually striking but awful stepped keys of the later keyboards. I know that HP in recent years is not the same company as back in the day, certainly their modern offerings are junk. I hate them for acquiring Compaq's unnatural love of Torx fasteners along with everything else from that festering carbuncle that somehow managed to acquire the splendor that was Digital, even if Digital couldn't make a good keyboard to save their lives (if anyone knows of a better DEC keyboard than the OEM Fujitsu Peerless boards, I'd like to know about it. I'm curious to know what the VT05 used as in my experience it's Stackpoles all the way back to the VT52 "DECScope"). They kept the fucking Compaq name alive and DEC dead, killed off everything useful or interesting DEC made and basically stopped introducing innovative products of their own. I've been scrapping out horrible desktop PCs of late, and several HP machines have this hilarious thing called the "Personal Media Drive Bay". It's a USB-B male in a box and sometimes a barrel connector, tied into the main board's USB and the power supply's 12v rail, respectively. That's it. Oh, and for no good reason they made it take its own, weird bay in the computer instead of fitting it into a half-height drive bay. This is always mounted in the way and is fucking huge and uses a lot more metal than it should, not in quality of construction but in stupid, giant flanges. I have no idea what this thing is for or what they were going for beyond a slightly cleaner implementation of a twenty-something-year-old standard. Or perhaps it's a way to charge a whole lot extra for a laptop drive in an enclosure...

I'm actually quite in awe of you managing to be much more ranty than me. Okay, I admit I probably sounded a lot less ranty than I felt, but even so.

I'd heard that the HP of old used to make decent stuff, but I wasn't sure when that golden age was: I guess you've helpfully demarcated it for me in that things must've gone wrong in the early-mid '80s: certainly all the stuff I'd encountered was made after that and it was all awful. Both hardware and software were poorly designed and badly made; the Unix workstation I was lumbered with was particularly nasty in those regards, the contemporary VaxStation being much nicer. Seems ironic that HP managed to distil the crap from all three companies and binned all the good stuff. Though it's debatable whether there was much "good stuff" in Compaq, DEC had so much awesome technology and build their stuff really nicely, but were historically hopelessly inept at selling it. And then Greasy Bob Palmer happened: he was such an utter disaster you really can be forgiven if he was installed as a wrecker.

But you're right, the one thing DEC didn't do was good keyboards. The LK201 was a milestone in terms of its layout, even if it was a bit idiosyncratic in some regards, but those rubber domes. :/ Actually as rubber-dome keyboards go it's not actually too bad and is certainly quite adequate but that's probably about the highest praise I can give it: a good rubber dome is still a rubber dome.

To be fair to HP, Dell, Lenovo, et al., the enterprise lines of their respective hardware is usually quite good. If you consider that 30 years ago, people rarely had their own machine, hardware was purpose built. Now, consumer demand is so great and the need for profit so high, that consumers end up with crappy computers that will last only a couple of years before it gets thrown into the landfill and the cycle repeats. All of the hardware I've owned, no matter the company, has infinitely better professional/business hardware.

I disagree, the HP stuff I encountered between the late '80s and late '90s was horrible. DEC and IBM stuff was well designed and nicely built, and some other manufacturers were as you describe (slightly flimsy low-end stuff but much better professional stuff) but all the HP systems I used were awful. I'm talking about mid-range systems and professional workstations here.

vometia wrote: I disagree, the HP stuff I encountered between the late '80s and late '90s was horrible. DEC and IBM stuff was well designed and nicely built, and some other manufacturers were as you describe (slightly flimsy low-end stuff but much better professional stuff) but all the HP systems I used were awful. I'm talking about mid-range systems and professional workstations here.

The other thing you have to understand about H/P is that, until quite recently, there were multiple, completely independent divisions that operated more-or-less as their own entity and that some of them made products that did the same thing, so the products you encountered were quite likely being made at the same time as some actually good stuff. However as the 80s wore on and the 90s dawned (that was a miserable decade if ever there was one) the ratio of good stuff to shit steadily declined until we reach the present day where there's nothing to distinguish H/P from the next company shitting out unremarkable desktop boxes with the same feature-set. Oh, and you can add Apollo Computer to the list of good stuff that H/P hoovered up then strangled all the originality out of. I live a stone's throw from their old headquarters and sigh every time I pass by. We used to be so great here, the 128 Corridor was the Silicon Valley of the East, we had Apollo, Masscomp, DEC, Data General, Wang Labs, Prime, and so many other greats that were laid low. I've said before that if I had a time machine, the first person I'd liquidate would be the Tylenol Murderer, for making me fight with every goddamn desirous thing I buy, but I can say for sure that the second would be Steve Jobs. The last time I had to use a Mac, the way they implement the mouse made me wish Doug Englebart's mother had had an abortion.

Red_October wrote: The other thing you have to understand about H/P is that, until quite recently, there were multiple, completely independent divisions that operated more-or-less as their own entity and that some of them made products that did the same thing, so the products you encountered were quite likely being made at the same time as some actually good stuff. However as the 80s wore on and the 90s dawned (that was a miserable decade if ever there was one) the ratio of good stuff to shit steadily declined until we reach the present day where there's nothing to distinguish H/P from the next company shitting out unremarkable desktop boxes with the same feature-set. Oh, and you can add Apollo Computer to the list of good stuff that H/P hoovered up then strangled all the originality out of. I live a stone's throw from their old headquarters and sigh every time I pass by. We used to be so great here, the 128 Corridor was the Silicon Valley of the East, we had Apollo, Masscomp, DEC, Data General, Wang Labs, Prime, and so many other greats that were laid low. I've said before that if I had a time machine, the first person I'd liquidate would be the Tylenol Murderer, for making me fight with every goddamn desirous thing I buy, but I can say for sure that the second would be Steve Jobs. The last time I had to use a Mac, the way they implement the mouse made me wish Doug Englebart's mother had had an abortion.

I can believe the thing about it being a sort of "corporate collective" where individual bits were doing their own thing: I guess it was the era of the "business unit" after all. I guess at least DEC tried to make sure it wasn't competing with itself, though I could rather drily say it didn't need to try too hard as it was so bad at selling stuff by that time. The rumours were certainly true, even when I asked to purchase something for myself, the answer was "it's too much bother for us to sell it to you", pretty much. If even an employee can't buy something... :/ A far cry from my time at Philips which was all too keen to sell stuff to its employees: partly as it was just a nice thing to do, but of course providing them with discounted branded gear is also a good form of grass-roots marketing.

Sad to see that list of companies, though. I've often thought that something is badly wrong when it seems a company's long-term success is based not on the strength of their products but how good they are at playing the game: hence the absolute dominance of HP, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and so on, who for the most part haven't produced great stuff. For me, Microsoft sets the standard of sharp business practices and products of the sort that turned back the clock by years, possibly decades, compared to what should have been. But in spite of their crapware and ludicrous pricing they're now just the name that people associate with software. It's so sad that people now expect their computer to be running laggy bugware that's as difficult to use as it is to manage.

I don't even know all the names or at least all the products of those you list, which also strikes me as being a bit sad. I know that Prime has its own following having produced an innovative bunch of mid-rangers. Add to that Norsk Data, which I hadn't even heard of until recently when I was bored and looking for something interesting to read about, as well as our home-grown ICL, whose nationalisation may have been controversial but selling off was its death, sadly. And the whole slew of early '80s 8-bitters. I dunno if anyone under 30 will have heard of Acorn, and it's sad that Sophie Wilson is practically unheard of in spite of being the designer of what's possibly the most ubiquitous processor of our times. But you could say the same about the press response to Dennis Ritchie who died around the same time as Steve Jobs: one of these people made priceless contributions to the world of IT and was a nice guy to boot; the other was a narcissistic bastard. So the press venerated Jobbies and ignored Ritchie.

And I'm certainly with you where The Grey Decade is concerned: God, that was a miserable time.

vometia wrote:

Red_October wrote: The other thing you have to understand about H/P is that, until quite recently, there were multiple, completely independent divisions that operated more-or-less as their own entity and that some of them made products that did the same thing, so the products you encountered were quite likely being made at the same time as some actually good stuff. However as the 80s wore on and the 90s dawned (that was a miserable decade if ever there was one) the ratio of good stuff to shit steadily declined until we reach the present day where there's nothing to distinguish H/P from the next company shitting out unremarkable desktop boxes with the same feature-set. Oh, and you can add Apollo Computer to the list of good stuff that H/P hoovered up then strangled all the originality out of. I live a stone's throw from their old headquarters and sigh every time I pass by. We used to be so great here, the 128 Corridor was the Silicon Valley of the East, we had Apollo, Masscomp, DEC, Data General, Wang Labs, Prime, and so many other greats that were laid low. I've said before that if I had a time machine, the first person I'd liquidate would be the Tylenol Murderer, for making me fight with every goddamn desirous thing I buy, but I can say for sure that the second would be Steve Jobs. The last time I had to use a Mac, the way they implement the mouse made me wish Doug Englebart's mother had had an abortion.

I can believe the thing about it being a sort of "corporate collective" where individual bits were doing their own thing: I guess it was the era of the "business unit" after all. I guess at least DEC tried to make sure it wasn't competing with itself, though I could rather drily say it didn't need to try too hard as it was so bad at selling stuff by that time. The rumours were certainly true, even when I asked to purchase something for myself, the answer was "it's too much bother for us to sell it to you", pretty much. If even an employee can't buy something... :/ A far cry from my time at Philips which was all too keen to sell stuff to its employees: partly as it was just a nice thing to do, but of course providing them with discounted branded gear is also a good form of grass-roots marketing.

Sad to see that list of companies, though. I've often thought that something is badly wrong when it seems a company's long-term success is based not on the strength of their products but how good they are at playing the game: hence the absolute dominance of HP, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and so on, who for the most part haven't produced great stuff. For me, Microsoft sets the standard of sharp business practices and products of the sort that turned back the clock by years, possibly decades, compared to what should have been. But in spite of their crapware and ludicrous pricing they're now just the name that people associate with software. It's so sad that people now expect their computer to be running laggy bugware that's as difficult to use as it is to manage.

I don't even know all the names or at least all the products of those you list, which also strikes me as being a bit sad. I know that Prime has its own following having produced an innovative bunch of mid-rangers. Add to that Norsk Data, which I hadn't even heard of until recently when I was bored and looking for something interesting to read about, as well as our home-grown ICL, whose nationalisation may have been controversial but selling off was its death, sadly. And the whole slew of early '80s 8-bitters. I dunno if anyone under 30 will have heard of Acorn, and it's sad that Sophie Wilson is practically unheard of in spite of being the designer of what's possibly the most ubiquitous processor of our times. But you could say the same about the press response to Dennis Ritchie who died around the same time as Steve Jobs: one of these people made priceless contributions to the world of IT and was a nice guy to boot; the other was a narcissistic bastard. So the press venerated Jobbies and ignored Ritchie.

And I'm certainly with you where The Grey Decade is concerned: God, that was a miserable time.

I have indeed heard of ICL, if only inasmuch as they were the ones who were responsible for distribution of the Three Rivers Perq (An early "3M" workstation -this has nothing to do with Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, but refers to the performance of the system: a Megabyte of Ram, a Megaflop of Processing [or one VUP for an old DEC head ] and a Megapixel display) in the UK. I have also heard of the contrast between Jobs and Ritchie.

Apollo was responsible for the Apollo/Domain workstations, the most powerful of which had performance of a "significant fraction" of a Cray Y-MP.
Data General was an Also-Ran to DEC and did much the same thing. They are remembered here for their excellent color schemes on their Dasher terminals and the minicomputers they served (Nova and Eclipse). They also made one of the very first laptops, the DG-1.
Masscomp was a specialist in real-time and other high-workload processing and were very good at extracting performance you wouldn't think of a system being capable of from said system.
Wang Labs was a calculator maker from way back when who basically bridged the divide between calculator and computer just like H/P did, although they didn't do the whole "Yes this is really a calculator please ignore the ASCII keyboard" routine. They had a very, very early personal computer in the 2200, a well-liked mini in the VS, and a large fraction of the Word Processing market. Like many contemporaries, they stumbled with the transition to the IBM PC based marketplace and eventually failed, although a significant contribution to their failure was the death of An Wang, the founder, who, like Edwin Land at Polaroid (most technically inclined people of any stripe will know that Thomas Edison holds the most patents in the US. Who is the runner-up for this post? Dr. Land. Most non-technical people look at an older Polaroid camera and think it's called a "Land Camera" because you can't use it on a ship for some reason) basically WAS Wang Laboratories and without his steady hand on the helm, the company foundered. Their headquarters building still stands, and in the grand New England tradition of calling things what they used to be, it is still generally referred to as Wang Towers. The name is still faintly visible on the Brutalist masterpiece's facade. As a sidenote, the Soviets loved their machines and GOSPLAN in particular was a Wang operation. They also made copies for general use, of course; the government-types got the real deal.

Thanks for the breakdown of the companies! Though I had heard of several, I didn't really know the details; and not helped that I managed to somehow confuse Data General with Digital Research. Rather embarrassing as the Nova seems to often be mentioned in the same sentence as the PDP-8 for some reason. Masscomp is the one I really didn't know about, and talking of Sophie Wilson, I think her original claim to fame was somewhat similar in that the astonishingly fast BBC Basic eked out far more than a 2 MHz 6502 should be capable of doing.

Wang I had heard of, I think everybody of a certain age has sniggered a bit at the perhaps ill-advised name; I know they were a big name in word processing before the IBM PC came along and suffocated the entire personal IT market with its dullness.

But Mr Wang (and indeed Mr Land) I knew nothing about at all. I dare say their patents probably were for actual inventiveness, unlike Edison who I understand was very much the Bill Gates of his day: a shrewd, ruthless and rather unethical businessman whose actual contributions may never be known but who was by most accounts extremely adept at taking credit for other people's ideas. Also a trademark of Jobs, who apparently used to frequently irritate Jony Ive by claiming he'd invented the stuff Ive had designed. And probably numerous others. :/

Brutalism is a whole other subject. I find even my own opinion tends to find itself controversial: I find it can look impressive or it can just be fugly. I think a major part of that is whether or not it's softened with greenery and water features or is just a pure celebration of concrete. The Barbican in London is a bit of a monument to Brutalism and as much as I hate London (or perhaps because I hate London) it manages to somehow be a bit of an oasis of peace and decorum compared to its surroundings.

vometia wrote: Thanks for the breakdown of the companies! Though I had heard of several, I didn't really know the details; and not helped that I managed to somehow confuse Data General with Digital Research. Rather embarrassing as the Nova seems to often be mentioned in the same sentence as the PDP-8 for some reason. Masscomp is the one I really didn't know about, and talking of Sophie Wilson, I think her original claim to fame was somewhat similar in that the astonishingly fast BBC Basic eked out far more than a 2 MHz 6502 should be capable of doing.

Wang I had heard of, I think everybody of a certain age has sniggered a bit at the perhaps ill-advised name; I know they were a big name in word processing before the IBM PC came along and suffocated the entire personal IT market with its dullness.

But Mr Wang (and indeed Mr Land) I knew nothing about at all. I dare say their patents probably were for actual inventiveness, unlike Edison who I understand was very much the Bill Gates of his day: a shrewd, ruthless and rather unethical businessman whose actual contributions may never be known but who was by most accounts extremely adept at taking credit for other people's ideas. Also a trademark of Jobs, who apparently used to frequently irritate Jony Ive by claiming he'd invented the stuff Ive had designed. And probably numerous others. :/

Brutalism is a whole other subject. I find even my own opinion tends to find itself controversial: I find it can look impressive or it can just be fugly. I think a major part of that is whether or not it's softened with greenery and water features or is just a pure celebration of concrete. The Barbican in London is a bit of a monument to Brutalism and as much as I hate London (or perhaps because I hate London) it manages to somehow be a bit of an oasis of peace and decorum compared to its surroundings.

I give Wang great credit, they owned the name in whole, once ran an ad campaign stating "Play with your Wang". Jobs stole everything that made his company anything at all, the whole idea of the GUI he ripped off from Xerox only to later state that they had had it all wrong! I don't find Gates anywhere near as repulsive as Jobs. I hold Microsoft to task for what they've done, especially what they're doing of late, it's been largely downhill since Windows 2000. Unless things turn around sharply and soon, Windows 7 will be the last version of Windows I use. "Windows as a service" can go straight to Hell, and if it says I sent 'em, it'll get a discount!

Brutalism, like just about every other aspect of modern architecture that I like, has been pulled off variously well and poorly. I do tend to agree that it plays well with water features and foliage, and that The Barbican is brilliant. There's no school of architecture that I can say, as a whole, that I like it. Each has its failings and masterpieces. But I do hate that, here, where I live, they still build houses that look identical to the ones built by the colonists! They are differentiated by being set back from the road and on tall-ish foundations, but are made to look the same, teeming with skeuomorphs like windows with fake mullions (do they even know that the reason for mullions was that, back in the day, it was hideously difficult and expensive to make a large piece of glass suitable for a window?), clad in impermeable plastic inexplicably made to look like the same stupid clapboards that the colonial houses have. Modern building techniques and materials allow for houses of any dimension and appearance, yet they look so goddamn similar! I was surprised to learn that the modern architecture I admire had started back in the 1920s, and the majority had kept right along building houses that look like antiques!