Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
An historical oddity is that one of the design goals of the QWERTY keyboard was a deliberate attempt to slow down typists to prevent the type bars from tangling.
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That is frequently claimed, but some say it's untrue.
I've built custom keyboard hardware (miniature keyboards) using Tact switches wired to the chip/IC out of a PS/2 or USB keyboard. It's quite easy to trace the rows and columns.
MS had a Keyboard layout editor that created a driver. Seems to fail on install on Win7 & win10, though they still linked to their installer last time I looked.
One idea I had was four light pipes, each illuminating one corner of every key. Drive the LEDs with interface IC Numlock & Scroll-lock and repurpose those status (Sent from host to keyboard on all XT, AT, PS/2 and USB PC compatible keyboards at least, not set by keyboard) for 1 of 4 states: base, shifted, AltGr and AltGr shifted. Thus 192 easy to see characters.
If you added Caps Lock LED too and had a 1 of 8 decoder and fancier light pipes then each printable key could show 8 letters per key cap at normal size giving 384 characters. The simple solution used a clear symbol in each corner.
I have a suspicion that current keyboards use the same IC for UK & USA (one key less) and probably anything with similar layout but the extra button left of the Z (missing on USA) is simply not wired as swapping UK-USA layouts in software OS works as if there is simply a missing key on USA keyboard.
Caps Lock was shift lock on mechanical typewriters because the carriage was lifted for caps and punctuation. Shift was too painful for more than one or two letters.
So Caps Lock is a good choice for compose. Similarly the only value of Tab (and inverse Tab) is to navigate form fields. Physical typewriters used mechanical tab stops for tables. Tabs should never be used in Wordprocessing, set a paragraph style. Some say not in programming either.
Anyone use Scroll Lock, Sys Rq, Pause or Break since the days of console/Terminal / DOS / CPM etc computing?
Anyone else find the Insert Key and Num Lock keys pointless?
I do like a desktop keyboard without the numeric pad to allow mouse closer to keyboard, but I accept some people love the numeric pad. I also find Multimedia extra keys pointless, though in Linux you can easily map them. I like a basic keyboard. My Mitsumi ones from 1990s are nice though they used a full size DIN (AT plug) to miniDIN (PS/2) adaptor and laptop needs a PS/2 to USB adaptor.