> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard<p>is a particularly humorous instance of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome</a>
Very nice post, I love computer history and lore and this fits just right!<p>I would also add ZX Spectrum keyboard with all the keywords on it. G/GOTO, L/LET, P/PRINT etc. Was lots of fun.<p>We should have engraved common actions on the keys when we could, before every software invented its own set of keyboard shortcuts.
No amount of drooling over Apple keyboards will make me forget that Apple's designers didn't add keys for basic functions such as Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo.
And there was already precedent:<p><a href="https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.php/Fun_cluster.html" rel="nofollow">https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.ph...</a><p><a href="https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173" rel="nofollow">https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173</a><p>Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):<p><a href="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-time-pt-2-the-mac-side/6.1600w.avif" rel="nofollow">https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-ti...</a>
I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk</a> to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.
The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See <a href="https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii" rel="nofollow">https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii</a> for a photo.<p>Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.
Having seen laptops with dedicated copy/paste/undo/redo keys, I think Apple can be forgiven for not going down the function key rabbit hole: <a href="https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/img/powerlite.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/img/powerlite.jpg</a><p>(Yes, they could have just replaced the "regular" function keys with copy/paste keys, but I feel like that would have gone over about as well as the various times they've, uh, tried to replace the function keys)
At least we get cmd and control as separate keys still, which makes copy/paste/… in a terminal a breeze, without either needing to sacrifice terminal control keys, or remember to use different c/p sequences in different scenarios.
I work primarily on Macs, but also have Windows machines on my desk. Switching to Windows, I always have to pause and think, "Wait… I'm supposed to press <i>what</i> to copy again?"<p>Conflating meta keys with control keys is one of the more pernicious abominations Microsoft saddled on the tech world.<p>Shift - Control - Meta - Super - Hyper. Each has its place.
The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.
You can also use Emacs keys (Ctrl-D) for one-handed delete. Very convenient when Caps Lock is remapped to Control.
<i>The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.</i><p>I bind Delete to F12 on every machine I use. It's a wonderful thing.
Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.
I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers.<p>Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively have decided that computers should be standardised so that learnt skills would be transferrable, and therefore they probably imposed ideas like standardised keyboard layouts.<p>Of course it turned out that the next generation were totally capable of operating computers without any formal training, were totally fine with different operating systems, different keyboard layouts, different applications etc, and so there was probably lots of wasted effort solving a non-existent problem.
I'm wondering where those Canadian keyboards are used. I live in Canada, have seen plenty of multilingual keyboards, and have seen those symbols perhaps once. Even so I can't be sure it was on a keyboard. I just recognized one of the symbols.
Somewhat related: I live in France but have learnt computing on a QWERTY US keyboard back in the days, not AZERTY. As a result the only keyboard layout I can use without losing my sanity is a QWERTY US MacBook with a Canadian layout - I have my Q right where I want it, Enter key is lined up in the middle row, # $ % * are there for coding, and all the accents é è à ^ ç are there too. Thank you, Canada.
I suspect its Quebec only
Québec and federal governments.
From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too many family tech support issues trying to help a struggling relative understand that command and 'open apple' are the same thing.
On the JIS 2003 model, the more traditional Control position is great (it’s how I map my boards) but the Caps Lock positioning is really good too and makes so much sense with how infrequently it’s used. Very little risk of accidentally hitting it. I wonder why more boards haven’t adopted it.
2008 song about the Apple key by Hot Lava: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts3tLs6xB1U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts3tLs6xB1U</a>
I think the increased use of symbols was because both Europe and Canada are multilingual m, right?
All this micro-management of these standards only serves to confuse people and ultimately causes entry errors and wastes time. Go find the relevant XKCD comic on your own.<p>I personally miss the Plato IV Plasma Terminal Keyboard - <a href="https://codex.retro1.org/plato:tutor:plato_keyboard" rel="nofollow">https://codex.retro1.org/plato:tutor:plato_keyboard</a> and <a href="http://xahlee.info/kbd/plato_iv_keyboard.html" rel="nofollow">http://xahlee.info/kbd/plato_iv_keyboard.html</a> . Those keys on the right with represented many common functions. But the entire keyboard was designed for a future where computers would facilitate many worlds, not just a replacement for a typewriter or calculator.
The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.
The symbols are from a weird ISO/IEC standard (9995-7 ?) that never really caught on except in a few places. I have seen the lock-key symbols more often on lock light panels than on keycaps.
I recall seeing that on typewriters when i was a kid (in the 90s). I dont know if i ever saw it on a computer keyboard.
I enjoyed the post, but it always bothers me when tech people don't know the difference between Return and Enter.<p>Panic, for example, gets this right. In Transmit, pressing Return connects to a server. Pressing Enter enters rename mode.
> <i>You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: [happy-face] or [sad-face]</i><p>Did the editor repace :) with [happy-face]?
Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?
??? This isn’t on the linked page.
I wonder why people stopped adding symbols to ASCII. The number row on Macs is just these characters:<p><pre><code> ~!@#$%^&*()_+
</code></pre>
And every programming language uses a subset of these. But why <i>these</i> symbols? Why didn't people add more symbols to the keyboard?
Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph).
German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.<p>Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.
ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.<p>(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)
ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.
>And every programming language uses a subset of these.<p>You might like <a href="https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode" rel="nofollow">https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode</a>