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Re: the IBM keyboard

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Oh joy!  forgive my nose, especially since I missed this post at first.
Still, I am typing right now, this very moment, on a real IBM clicky 
keyboard!
However the cable is starting to fray,  and I was wondering if I would be 
able to replace this treasure...i. have. had. this. for. a. very! long 
time.
Anyway, your link to this company may be a solution and I am sososososo 
happy!
thanks,
Kare


On Sun, 30 Aug 2015, rlharris@oplink.net wrote:

> On Sun, August 30, 2015 10:42 pm, Doug wrote:
>> What you need is an IBM model M keyboard. They are refurbished and sold
>> by Clicky Keys:
>> http://www.clickykeyboards.com/
>
> I learned to touch-type in 1963, in highschool, on a manual keybar machine
> with QWERTY keyboard and blank keycaps; I was the best typist in the class
> (90 to 100 wpm).  Over the years I have used manual and portable keybar
> machines and the marvelous IBM Correcting Selectric II.  Then I moved, in
> succession, to an IBM memory typewriter, an early dedicated word
> processing system by Exxon, and then to a very expensive professional word
> processing system, which I believe was manufactured by
> Addressorgraph-Multigraph.  My next system was a floppy-based IBM-PC
> running version 1.0 of M$ Word for DO$, which I purchased sometime in the
> interval 1980-1983.
>
> Thankfully, shortly after acquiring the IBM-PC, I switched to the Dvorak
> keymap, using dedicated (custom firmware) Dvorak keyboards.  But by the
> time that I had worn out several of the dedicated keyboards, keymapping
> software became available for the M$ DO$ environment.
>
> Eventually, at the stroke of midnight on 31 December A.D. 1999, M$ Word
> 5.0 for DO$ began writing garbage to the data files.  This is one of the
> very few genuine "Y2K" bugs.  M$ had no patch, but offered instead a free
> copy of Word 5.5.  But who in his right mind would migrate to 5.5?  Word
> 5.0 was the last version of Word for DO$ which could be used without aid
> of the rodent, and a rodent is anathema to efficiency.
>
> Hundreds of Word 5.0 documents had to be abandoned, because, even in the
> present day, while it is possible to convert Word 5.0 documents to plain,
> unformatted ASCII, there appears to be no automated method to convert the
> convoluted proprietary M$ scheme of encoding to another format while
> preserving (via markup) vital formatting such as italic and boldface.  And
> the labour of manual editing to add markup for italic and boldface was
> prohibitive, not to mention the subsequent proofreading).
>
> So that fiasco led me to Linux and gave me the determination never again
> to fall into the trap of proprietary software and proprietary encoding
> schemes.  The use of plain text and markup is the only safe and sane
> approach to word processing.
>
> ==========================
>
> Anyway, all this history comes to mind because I recall that there is
> something really strange about the IBM keyboard -- at least to anyone who
> types by touch.  Looking today at a photograph of a mode M, I think that
> the problem is that IBM reduced the width of the left-hand shift key, in
> order to accommodate a < > key.
>
> This is something which, for me, destroys the usefulness of the Model M.
> And keymapping cannot correct the fact that two keycaps occupy the space
> in which the fingers of a touch typist expect to find only one keycap.
>
> But this blunder is typical of IBM, who at times has done stupid things to
> accommodate stupid customers.  A similar blunder was the IBM
> implementation of the Dvorak keyboard for the original Selectric.  August
> Dvorak arranged the keys of the numeric row in the order 751902468 .  But
> IBM implemented a "modified" Dvorak keyboard in which the keys of the
> numeric row are in the order 123456780 .  With original Dvorak layout,
> numbers are typed easily and with few errors, while in the IBM layout,
> even a good typist has difficulty with numbers.
>
> By the way, xkb provides not only the "modified" layout, but also the
> "Dvorak Classic" layout.
>
> RLH
>
> -- 
> Be ware of confounding ignorance and stupidity.  Ignorance may be
> corrected by instruction and education.  But there is no remedy for
> stupidity.
>
>
>

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the IBM keyboard rlharris@oplink.net - 2015-08-31 03:00 +0200
  Re: the IBM keyboard Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> - 2015-08-31 03:20 +0200
    Re: the IBM keyboard rlharris@oplink.net - 2015-08-31 03:40 +0200
      Re: the IBM keyboard Doug <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> - 2015-08-31 06:20 +0200
        Re: the IBM keyboard Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> - 2015-08-31 06:50 +0200
      Re: the IBM keyboard Stuart Longland <stuartl@longlandclan.yi.org> - 2015-09-03 23:30 +0200
    Re: the IBM keyboard Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2015-08-31 17:00 +0200
  Re: the IBM keyboard Carl Fink <carl@finknetwork.com> - 2015-08-31 03:30 +0200
    Re: the IBM keyboard David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2015-08-31 04:40 +0200
      Re: the IBM keyboard rlharris@oplink.net - 2015-08-31 05:40 +0200
      Re: the IBM keyboard David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2015-08-31 06:20 +0200
      Re: the IBM keyboard Stuart Longland <stuartl@longlandclan.yi.org> - 2015-09-03 23:30 +0200

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