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

[mike delyea]

I had a coco3 and an MC-10 that I had connected via a 30 foot serial cable
which I made myself (using a BBS program I copied out of the Rainbow and
some terminal program on the MC-10) that I used for testing possible BBS
configurations should my wife ever decide to let me go ahead and run a BBS.
Sadly, neither my marriage nor the BBS ever lasted.  I actually had a lot of
fun with the MC-10, though I did find it awkward to type with.  I guess the
original coco (which I never owned) would be similar to typing on the
MC-10.  I still think the MC-10 would be great for displaying a scrolling
news/event/weather information/time thingy for a captive audience (say the
foyer of a cheap hotel).  I also experimented with that application - using
the coco to update the info displayed by the MC-10.
Sorry for rambling, I thought of the chiclet keyboard on the MC-10 and the
memories came flooding back.

On 7/19/07, Steve Ostrom <smostrom7 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> I never thought the keyboard design of the Coco 1 was bad.  I happily used
> it for many years.  What was bad was when the keys would begin to stick.
> Then it became a royal pain !!
>
> -- Steve --
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rogelio Perea" <os9dude at gmail.com>
> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 9:05 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Is it me, or are chiclet keyboards coming back?
>
>
> > 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
> >
> > --
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> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> >
>
>
>
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