Oh joy! forgive my nose, especially since I missed this post at first.
Still, I am typing right now, this very moment, on a real IBM clicky
keyboard!
However the cable is starting to fray, and I was wondering if I would be
able to replace this treasure...i. have. had. this. for. a. very! long
time.
Anyway, your link to this company may be a solution and I am sososososo
happy!
thanks,
Kare
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015, rlhar...@oplink.net wrote:
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.
