new Sun type-4 keyboards

[Joe Grace]

Just to make sure everyone is clear on BBN engineers's thinking on
keyboards :-), I thought I would add my 2 cents. 

To me, there are 2 families of acceptable keyboards, neither of which
corresponds to an ANSI standard or anything.  Rather, they correspond to
"empirical" or practical standards. 

The VT100 family.  The older Sun keyboards fall under this category.  This
layout has the (IBM) Selectric typewriter arrangement of keys, with
<control> where <caps lock> usually is, <escape> at the top left (just
above <tab>), and <delete> or <backspace> just above <return>.  The older
Sun keyboards add <meta> keys to the right and left of the space bar, but
typically VT100 layout keyboards have no such keys.

The 'new age' or "enhanced" IBM PC keyboards.  These are nicer than the
VT100 family keyboards in that there are _2_ control keys and _2_ meta
keys which basically become 2nd and 3rd <shift> keys.  This layout
promotes high speed touch typing.  I don't recall where the <escape> key
is on these keyboards, but I think it needs (via a PC layout program or
such) to be swapped with another key to get it in its "usual" top-left
location.  This would be a problem except that a key exists in the
"proper" location, so the situation is easily fixable in software.

I just saw the new Sun keyboard today, and the biggest flaw I noticed is
that they shrunk the <return> key to squeeze in another key.  OOOPS!

IBM did this sort of thing with their original IBM PCs to protect their
word processing DisplayWriter systems from being replaced with the less
expensive line.  IBM pushed not only the <return>, but also their 2
<shift> keys out by a key.  Basically, touch typists can't use the old PC
keyboards.  Ditto for VT220 keyboards which are similarly broken.  Sun
seems to be trying to kill their top of the line computers --- a little
backwards even by IBM standards ;-). 

When the DEC salespeople demo'ed the 3100, I told them I thought the
computer was "broken".  Seriously, no smiley.  The 2 most important parts
of a computer are its screen (output interface) and its (you guessed it)
keyboard.  If these are broken, the computer is busted.

The funny thing is, my DECcy friends tell me that DEC uses keyboards with
reasonable layouts *internally* but just doesn't sell them to customers.
Talk about stupid.

I hope Sun doesn't make a similar mistake.  Sun, please, at least offer a
choice of keyboards.

Thanks for listening,

= Joe =
Joe Grace
ARPA: jgrace at bbn.com
UUCP: {harvard,husc6,decvax,etc.}!bbn!jgrace