GUMBY%MIT-OZ%mit-mc@sri-unix.UUCP (06/17/83)
From: David Vinayak Wallace <GUMBY%MIT-OZ@mit-mc>
Date: Thursday, 16 June 1983 13:43-EDT
From: MBF at cmu-cs-c
What's your favorite keyboard? Why?
Well, for me the most important comsideration is the actual feel of
the keys. The best I ever found was a highly mechanical one made by
MIcrokswitch for a company I worked for a few years ago. Each key had
a nice solid barely-audible "click," which helped me to tell when I
had actually hit a key. It was also easy on the fingers. Too hard,
and your fingertips bang on the baseplate. Too hard and the finger
muscles get tired (and you get tendonitis!). You also aren't sure
whether a character is actually sent or not. The closest I've come to
those microswitch keyboards is a cortron keyboard I found in the
surplus market. I've never found a good keyboard on a microcomputer
or on a cheap (<2k) terminal.
One of their problems is that they use flexible bases to mount the
keyboard. That meand the whole board flexes with a keystroke. The
next worst cronic problem is the lack of "sculpting" to the keyboard
-- the keys form a flat plane. The apple is a prime offender of this
one. The third is having too short a key travel distance -- the h19
and this horrible aaa I'm now using both have this unpleasantness.
On another issue, the bits and pieces I've picked up on the new,
$600 Coleco machine are that it is basically an in-house design - no big
OEM subsystems - with lots of shared components and bare-bones engineering
(read "economizing", not necessarily "cheap"). My personal opinion is
that it won't be a serious contender in the under-$1000 pc/hc market, largely
due to a serious case of the Commodore-itis: hardware and software engineering
executed by a technical group seemingly devoid of experience with serious
computers. Admittedly, all of the machines in this price category have
varying degrees of congenital head injury, but some, like the Ataris and
to some degree the TI, show at least a measure of integrated systems
engineering as if they were designed by people who wanted to be proud
of their efforts. But this is a religious issue...and unfortunately,
clever marketing plays entirely too much a part in successfully selling
large quantities of incompletely designed microcomputer systems (and
everything else, for that matter).
I don't see why the coleco should not do well, even by your reasoning.
The entire machine was made by a competent team and seems integrated
well -- MUCH better than either atari or ti. It seems the least
"incompletely designed" machine on the market!
david