On Sun, August 30, 2015 10:42 pm, Doug wrote: > What you need is an IBM model M keyboard. They are refurbished and sold > by Clicky Keys: > http://www.clickykeyboards.com/
I learned to touch-type in 1963, in highschool, on a manual keybar machine with QWERTY keyboard and blank keycaps; I was the best typist in the class (90 to 100 wpm). Over the years I have used manual and portable keybar machines and the marvelous IBM Correcting Selectric II. Then I moved, in succession, to an IBM memory typewriter, an early dedicated word processing system by Exxon, and then to a very expensive professional word processing system, which I believe was manufactured by Addressorgraph-Multigraph. My next system was a floppy-based IBM-PC running version 1.0 of M$ Word for DO$, which I purchased sometime in the interval 1980-1983. Thankfully, shortly after acquiring the IBM-PC, I switched to the Dvorak keymap, using dedicated (custom firmware) Dvorak keyboards. But by the time that I had worn out several of the dedicated keyboards, keymapping software became available for the M$ DO$ environment. Eventually, at the stroke of midnight on 31 December A.D. 1999, M$ Word 5.0 for DO$ began writing garbage to the data files. This is one of the very few genuine "Y2K" bugs. M$ had no patch, but offered instead a free copy of Word 5.5. But who in his right mind would migrate to 5.5? Word 5.0 was the last version of Word for DO$ which could be used without aid of the rodent, and a rodent is anathema to efficiency. Hundreds of Word 5.0 documents had to be abandoned, because, even in the present day, while it is possible to convert Word 5.0 documents to plain, unformatted ASCII, there appears to be no automated method to convert the convoluted proprietary M$ scheme of encoding to another format while preserving (via markup) vital formatting such as italic and boldface. And the labour of manual editing to add markup for italic and boldface was prohibitive, not to mention the subsequent proofreading). So that fiasco led me to Linux and gave me the determination never again to fall into the trap of proprietary software and proprietary encoding schemes. The use of plain text and markup is the only safe and sane approach to word processing. ========================== Anyway, all this history comes to mind because I recall that there is something really strange about the IBM keyboard -- at least to anyone who types by touch. Looking today at a photograph of a mode M, I think that the problem is that IBM reduced the width of the left-hand shift key, in order to accommodate a < > key. This is something which, for me, destroys the usefulness of the Model M. And keymapping cannot correct the fact that two keycaps occupy the space in which the fingers of a touch typist expect to find only one keycap. But this blunder is typical of IBM, who at times has done stupid things to accommodate stupid customers. A similar blunder was the IBM implementation of the Dvorak keyboard for the original Selectric. August Dvorak arranged the keys of the numeric row in the order 751902468 . But IBM implemented a "modified" Dvorak keyboard in which the keys of the numeric row are in the order 123456780 . With original Dvorak layout, numbers are typed easily and with few errors, while in the IBM layout, even a good typist has difficulty with numbers. By the way, xkb provides not only the "modified" layout, but also the "Dvorak Classic" layout. RLH -- Be ware of confounding ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance may be corrected by instruction and education. But there is no remedy for stupidity.