Type-4 keyboard (YA gripe)

[ji at walkuere.altair.fr]

Given all the traffic on this subject, I'll try to make my contribution
(?!) brief. Just a couple of points:

* Occasionally we get replies from inside Sun (or at least from people
with a foo at sun.com address) to various questions. Why is there noone
from Sun offering any insights this time? Did I miss any?

* Does Sun still provide the type-3 keyboard AS A SPARE PART? If so,
can local Sun reps be convinced (bribed, threatened, forced etc.)  to
substitute it for the type-4 one? 

* Is there actually anyone out there who *does* like the typewriter-
like layout? 

At any rate, who was the bonehead manager at our favorite company (pardon
my french) who thought the type-4 layout was better? I think I agree with
the poster who said that there is a conspiracy to make keyboards hard to
use. Why is it *that* hard to make a decent keyboard? IBM (again, pardon
my bad language!) had one of the best keyboards I've used on their early
ATs (modulo the ESC/backquote key placement, but that was trivial to fix).
Then they change that to their newer keyboard, that not only have keys in
brain-damaged places, but it also feels much worse. While the type-3
keyboards don't have the best feel in the world, they are quite good, and
the key placement is my favorite. At least we can be thankful that the
Control key is still where God meant it to be on the type-4s, and so are
the < and > keys. The VT220 keyboard has the < > on a key between the left
shift and the Z key, and both DEC and IBM (again, pardon my bad language
:-)) keyboards have the CAPS-LOCK where typewriters have them. Why do
those people think that we are typists who need their .'s and ,'s in both
shifted and unshifted modes? And how many users of engineering
workstations and terminals really ever use their caps lock key? I have
mine disabled in hardware (removed the little spring from inside and now
it's permanently down and out of harm's way). Of course, the keys can
always be remapped to whatever we want them, but that's not the solution.


How much more network bandwidth do we have to waste before we get the
powers-that-be to undo a stupid decision? SUN ARE YOU LISTENING?

/ji

PS: When my ninety-year old grandmother asked me what my job, I told
her I'm a typist (how else can I explain the fact that my work
involves typing all day?). Do you think she told Sun to make me
keyboards suited for typists? :-)