Faster keyboard repeat for type-4 keyboards?

[Peter Scott]

Hi.  When I migrated from a Sun-3 to a SPARC, the keyboard bothered me
because if I hit the same key twice rapidly in succession (like the 'c'
and the 's' in "succession"), at a rate I was used to on the Sun-3
keyboard, then as often as not, I would only get one occurrence of the key
instead of two; the type-4 keyboard wasn't picking up the second keypress.
I discovered that this was the case on every type-4 keyboard I tried.

I posted a note about it to a newsgroup about a year ago, and got a few
"me too" replies, including one from a guy in England who said he was
working with his support rep about it.  Later on he gave me more
information, to wit, that the problem had been fixed in newer keyboards
that had had a timing chip changed from 20ms to 10ms, and that these
keyboards had a date stamp of 9104 or later in the s/n.

I contacted my hardware support person; he had never heard of this
problem, and told me that there was no date stamp encoding in the s/n.  I
have talked to my software support person, national hardware support,
national software support, national technical assistance, national
telemarketing, and my local sales rep.  None of them knew anything about
the situation nor who to contact about it.  I finally sent e-mail to the
Sun U.K. rep my correspondent mentioned, and he replied that he could not
discuss the matter with me.

Does anyone know of any Sun employee anywhere in the U.S. who knows
anything about this???

This is news.  This is your       |    Peter Scott, NASA/JPL/Caltech
brain on news.  Any questions?    |    (pjs at euclid.jpl.nasa.gov)