Microsoft's little eyes light up as Oscar-winning Taika Waititi says Apple keyboards make him 'want to go back to PCs' Surface supremo Panos Panay took time out from fondling his slabs (and ordering up new business cards) to make a proposal last night to Oscar-winning filmmaker Taika Waititi. Waititi, who yesterday picked up the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for odd WWII film Jojo Rabbit, was asked for his thoughts on what writers …
Some people say that the Model F was better, although I'm quite happy with a Model M as my favorite keyboard.
The model F family, using non-contact capacitive key triggers and buckling springs and most often seen on the the original 5150 IBM PC or 5160 PC/XT was not the same as the Model M in any flavor of PS/2 or 5 pin DIN connector (these were referred to as the Advanced keyboard), but were the keyboard with 10 function keys in a 2x5 vertical strip on the left hand side of the keyboard, not as a top row. They also had a multi-purpose numeric keypad with no dedicated arrow keys (which explains why, even now, the numeric keyboard has arrow keys on 2, 4, 6 and 8 keys) without any clear space making the key pad a separate island from the main keyboard.
The feeling of these keyboards was a-maz-ing, and was clearly the best computer key feel that I had ever felt.
When the Advanced keyboard came along with the early PC/ATs the feel was very good, but not quite as good as the Model F. But the layout was much better (I had been using DEC LK201 keyboard layouts, and the IBM Advanced keyboard felt a better layout because it was close to the LK201).
If anybody made a Model F with the Advanced 102 (or even better 105) key layout and USB or even wireless interface, that would be incredible. and would be worth paying a small ransom for! I know there was a project to make small runs of Model Fs, but I don't think they were the Advanced layout.
Mind you, I do echo the comment earlier about the IBM Selectric typewriter keyboard. At the University I attended, there were has some configured as hard-copy terminals with the APL character golf ball, and they were a joy to use!
Those of us who get senior citizen discounts without asking may remember a time when "PC" simply meant "Personal Computer".
This was a bit before PC was re-purposed to mean only "bit for bit and bug for bug compatible with the IBM 5150 [1], complete with the BIOS and DOS not being able to agree whether the COM ports were numbered from zero or one, and for the love of all that is holy, _NEVER_ press the Turbo button"
[1] Those in the intersection of (computer nerds) and (union of (Van Halen fans), (law enforcement personnel), (police scanner obsessives)) got a laugh out of that designation. I guess Rat Mouth Florida never has any instances of people acting crazy in public (or has so many that they are not noticed).
How about the mid-90s Dell clunkers with the Alps keys? Just as well made as an IBM model M and originally available in a fetching shade of black.
Or... You know.... Go for a full RGB gaming spec mechanical keyboard for some reason.
I'm going already..
Mines the one with the DAS Keyboard manual in the pocket.
I did. (well, I wanted something with mechanical key switches that wasn't eyewateringly expensive. The RGB version of the keyboard I ended up with was on sale and cheaper than the non-backlit version.)
I'm a little too young to have scored a 80s or 90s keyboard and don't move around in the kind of circles that would land me with one so I make do with what I have now. Still like it WAY better than the mushy rubber dome Dell shit I have to use at work.
My wife has an iMac and she has an MS USB 102 keyboard plugged in as she prefers the clunkier keys over that slim nonsense that comes with Apple kit. The Windows key gets auto-mapped to the CMD key on an Apple keyboard, and Left-ALT is mapped to OPT and you're sorted!
I wish people would stop making life hard.
Since every single desktop, laptop and tablet / folio device does its own thing. Some copy Apple style keyboards, others offer chunkier keyboards with more travel. But perhaps that's the point. If you hate Dell laptops you can use one by Lenovo or whichever manufacturer produces one to your liking.
According to an acquaintance of mine who's in the biz, while the Academy won't charge you to put "Oscar™-winning <JobTitle>..." in front of your name, actually getting a statue to put on your mantel will cost you a couple of Gs, IIRC. So he may already have spent the money that would have gone for that new MBP.
It's kind of like those stars embedded in the sidewalk on the "Hollywood Walk of Fame". You get "awarded" a star after you agree to pay for it and sign a contract to see that it's maintained in good condition. Let it get shabby and suddenly someone else gets "awarded" a star in your spot!
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