[Coco] Is it me, or are chiclet keyboards coming back?

[Rogelio Perea]

For all the fuzz that many people threw against the original CoCo chiclets
keyboard, many of the modern day laptops and the kiosk PCs sport a chiclets
keyboard... so go figure this oddity of human behavior. Many of us remember
that the CoCo 1 was chastised to no end first because of the keyboard and
then because of its text screen; all other PC makers had REAL keyboards on
their computers: C=64, TI99/4A, Atari 800, etc...

If there's one keyboard I really had problems typing on, it is the CoCo 1 F
Board 'melted' keys keyboard... not enough travel and keys with a weird
mushy feeling in their mechanical feedback. For my hands build, the original
chiclets keyboard is *the best*, nice separation making it harder to
introduce typos... and I'm faster on those too. The later revised CoCo 2 and
in fact the CoCo 3 keyboard is also good.

Today's laptop users have sacrificed typeability for thinness, the keyboard
that came with the Tandy 1400? *that's* a keyboard; the Model 100 and 200 is
also a good example of sensible portability.


-=[ Rogelio ]=-


On 7/17/07, John Guin <johnguin at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Between the Mac notebooks (whichever the cheap ones are named nowadays)
> and
> now the Sony Vaio TZ, are chiclet style keyboards coming back?
>
> I thought the chiclet keyboard on the gray Cocos was hard to use, odd
> looking and a big reason people went with other brands which had much
> better
> keyboards.  I also remember people raving about the original IBm keyboard.
>
> So did I miss some hidden attribute of a chiclet that makes them desirable
> (again)?
>
> Just curious, and feel free to treat this as a rhetorical question,
> John