[Coco] CoCo4! 50% done!

[Steven Hirsch]

On Fri, 7 Feb 2014, Aaron Wolfe wrote:

> I was a long time model M devotee.  Still have two and will never let them
> go.
>
> That said, there has been a revival in mechanical switch keyboards in
> recent years.  You can now get a variety of keyboards with them. My main
> keyboard these days is a Filco TenKeyless.  Yes, the lack of any numeric
> keypad is actually one of its key selling points.  When you consider how
> much distance your right hand has to travel between typing position and
> mouse position,  removing the numeric pad saves your arm miles of movement
> in a year.  Nearly instant improvement in overall navigation speed just by
> not forcing the mouse to be 5 inches farther away than it has to be.  Then
> you have the key switches, which are the best part.  Imagine a model M that
> feels "light" somehow but still has that cerchunk that let's you know
> everything is OK.  The switches are mechanically similar to those used in
> the model M, just different weighting and trigger points, and IMHO its a
> (very slight) change for the better.   They are still just as annoying to
> everyone around as the model M keys are, I can provide references for that.
>
> Back when I got this keyboard it was only available in Japan and I paid
> nearly as much to a buying service as I did for the keyboard itself.  Came
> out to over $300 and worth every penny 100 times over in terms of
> efficiency.  Today you can get them on Amazon for under $100.  There are
> other vendors and models that are very good too.  The dark ages of holding
> onto your model M desperately are (maybe) over :).

Hmm.  A quick browse through eBay and Amazon turned up nothing much under 
$130 or so.  For that price I'll suffer the extra 5" of right hand travel. 
But, it's good to know that someone still cares about keyboard feel.  In 
this day and age of thumb-texting and 2-finger typing on chiclet 
keyboards, I was starting to believe that touch-typists were an endangered 
species.

<rant>
I probably receive 30-40 IM messages during the average work day and 
there's nothing more excruciating than suffering through a sender who 
takes a full minute or more to peck out each line of a paragraph.  Don't 
they teach typing in high school anymore?  I'm glad my employer feels this 
is somehow more efficient than picking up the blasted phone...
</rant>

Steve


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