From: Randal Whittle (rwhittle_at_usa.net)
Date: Thu Apr 27 2000 - 10:43:29 EDT
At 11:33 PM 04/26/2000 -0700, you wrote:
> I believe Ronald has used PCs from the time of the XT keyboards, when
>Ctrl was where Caps Locks is today, and Alt was where Left Ctrl is now.
>Caps Lock was located at today's Right Ctrl position.
Ahhh yes, I vaguely remember that now.
Then what Ronald is complaining about is that IBM didn't continue
the *flawed* keyboard in the original PC/XT design, because that Ctrl key
had no business supplanting the position where the Caps Lock key had
been--as a standard--for decades already.
In other words, the XT keyboard was the weirdo--it changed the
keyboard design to something it wasn't.
>This made Ctrl-key
>combinations easy as you could hold down Ctrl with your little finger
>and press most of the other keys without moving your hand too much.
I fail to see the problem then, as I have no difficulty doing the
same with the Ctrl key(s) in their present position.
>Today you need to move your hands from the "home" position to press
>Ctrl-key combinations,
Huh? Why? Its right below the Shift key--easy to access, easy to
reach...it doesn't require me to move my hands all over the place.
>and if the software you use frequently makes
>extensive use of them, the old key positions are more convenient. The
>current keyboard layout dates from the AT, but if you learned to type on
>the XT, as I did, the new layout took getting used to. I was quite
>annoyed when I first switched.
I can understand if you (or Ronald) learned on the XT and it
annoyed you to go back to the standard, just understand that the XT is the
oddball here--it was very much non-standard to begin with. It broke ranks
with the standard layout of the Dvorak keyboards used for
decades. Understandably, "new" keys had to be added for computer-specific
use (Ctrl, Alt, F-Keys, Cursor keys, etc.), but supplanting the existing
layout by moving things like the Tab or the Caps-Lock key isn't the way to go.
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