Sun-4 keyboards

[Steve Christensen]

Having used the new SPARCstation keyboard, I must admit that I do not like
it as well as the older Sun-3 keyboard.  On a daily basis, I use a Mac II
extended, NeXT, Sun-3, IBM P70-386 portable keyboard and the new Sun
keyboard, so moving from one kind of keyboard to another is common for me.
The new Sun keyboard is clearly better than some of these others so any
keyboard discussion is a relative one.  The new keyboard may not be as
nice for some people, but it is certainly much better than others.  I had
a chance to run on a DECstation 3100 and found the keyboard there to be so
different from the keyboards above that I made more typing mistakes than I
had in years.  The person who used it after me had the same problem.  

Like so many other things in the workstation market, the nature of the
keyboard is a matter of "religion" and familiarity rather than true
functionality in most cases.

[At same session I was playing with the DECstation, I got into a
disagreement with the others around me on "mice".  We uniformly hated the
DEC mechanical mouse, but some stated they love the Mac and NeXT
mechanical mice whereas I like the Sun optical mouse best.]

As with the PC market, it seems reasonable to have a third party company
make alternative Sun keyboards to satisfy those people who dislike the new
keyboards.

Steve Christensen
NCSA, University of Illinois
steve at ncsa.uiuc.edu