deskthority

I'm more worried about those awful legends. I get what they're trying to do with the symbol keys, but they've completely bodged it.

That is disturbing indeed, and I don't mean the filth.

My favourite odd key is the stabilized 2u (?) TAB key on some Commodore keyboards.

Caps lock and ctrl side by side … unusual. That was always an oddity about the BBC Micro: while many games used Z/X for left/right¹, games with only sideways motion often used caps lock/ctrl for left/right due to them being placed in a convenient position next to each other.

¹ The BBC Micro had arrow keys, but as was so common back then, they weren't in an arrangement that was usable for games. Instead of WASD, however, you normally had left/right and up/down motion on separate hands. ZX + :/ was the most common arrangement, followed by AZ + ,. — this way, you permanently had one finger over every direction key. The idea of an arrangement where you had to keep relocating at least one finger seemed like a backwards step.

I guess that the laptop in the first post must be a Chromebook - with a keyboard adapted from a Windows keyboard design. It looks 2.5u to me. The Wyse PCE has two 2.5u Control keys but the are stepped so that there is only 2u surface area.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: Caps lock and ctrl side by side … unusual.

The layout of Control and Caps Lock as small keys to the left of 'A' was copied from DEC terminal keyboards, as did the inverse-T cursor keys on the Shift row. I would think that DEC was much more influential than IBM in the early '80s, before the IBM PC.

BTW, the Commodore 64 had only two cursor keys, ↓ and →, but the designers had been smart enough to put them just right of the right Shift key, using Shift and these keys for the opposite directions. That meant that you could rest three fingers on these three keys to move around quite easily when you had got the hang of it.

derp