new Sun type-4 keyboards

[Winston Edmond]

(In a previous message, I said that my dislike of VT220-like keyboard layouts
 is sufficient to make me choose not to buy them.) 

>From: cre at EBay (Conrad Essen)
>To: avb at avb, sardina at sunrise.East
>Subject: Re:  keyboards

>        It sounds like the main point users hate is the location of keys,
>not the design or feel of the type 4 keyboard? Am I correct ?
>Conrad

Pretty much.  The essential issue is: Can I touch type on the new keyboard
for reasonably long periods and without making lots of mistakes caused by
key placement, size, etc.?

The feel of the keys on the Sun 386i was acceptable, although the keyboard
felt like it was a bit smaller than the type-3 keyboard.

Since the key bindings can be changed, I don't care if the key-to-ASCII
mapping differs from what I'm used to.  That's fixable.  On keyboards
whose keys are all physically the same mechanism (no physically locking
CAPS LOCK, for example), I could even fix things like swapping the
location of the CAPS LOCK and CTRL keys (or, generically, shift-like keys
and "character" keys).

If some manufacturer had replaced 'f' and 'g' with a single double-wide
key labelled 'g' and put 'f' in the middle of a row of function keys in
the upper right corner and said, "Can't you just use 'p' 'h' instead?",
most people would say that the keyboard was badly designed.  The problem
seems to be that manufacturers are eliminating keys from the "upper"
keyboard region and adding character keys to the "lower" region.  Various
manufacturers feel free to move DEL or backspace keys off the main key
area, insert new keys between 'z' and Left-Shift, make tiny, hard-to-hit
shift keys, put character keys like '\' in the midst of a collection of
shift-like keys, etc.  Usually, these kind of changes are very hard for
the user to modify.  Remapping can't completely compensate for the absence
of a key or the presence of an unwanted one.

For those who say: you can adjust...

One programmer at BBN worked on a VT220 for about a year.  He was a touch
typist.  His report: even after a year of using the keyboard, he still had
a much higher mistake rate with that keyboard than with any other
keyboard.  His comment was: there are some keyboard designs that are
beyond the bounds "adjustment" can handle.

In response to the message that said the type-3 keyboard had been disliked
when it appeared...

When Sun workstations started appearing in our department, I saw what
appeared to be an anomaly.  When I watched touch-typist programmers, I saw
them making what seemed to me an unusually large number of typing errors.
In some cases, it looked like the DELETE key was the most frequently typed
key.  :-)  On the other hand, these typists seemed to like the keyboard.
Later, when I got my Sun 3/50, I, too, found I made a lot of typing
errors, and I still do two years later (though not as many).  Yet, I like
the keyboard.  Why?  Because most of the errors are caused by two things:

(1) the lack of a registration indicator on the keyboard (e.g., dimples on
    'd' and 'k', sculptured 'f' and 'j', or some such) so that I can be
    offset and not know it; and

(2) since the key placement is good, I end up typing so fast that I start to
    make errors.  This is what would be improved by changing the feel of the
    keyboard.
 -WBE