On Nov 6, 2005, at 9:28 AM, Matt Grimaldi wrote:
There is quite a difference between a $10 and a $50 keyboard, btw. I guess I'm picky about how the key *feels* while being pressed, and the cheaper keyboards just don't do it right. Niether do the rollable keyboards, in their own way.
The first keyboard I paid real money for is a Saitek Eclipse illuminated, for which I paid about $50 or $60, to replace a $10 keyboard (A QTronix Scorpius with a built-in trackball, and a real piece of crap that failed to reliably type upper-case characters, and from which many of the keytop labels disappeared after a couple of months).
The Saitek is huge: bigger even than the old "Saratoga" keyboard from Apple (so named because it was about as big as an aircraft carrier). It has a great feel and even sounds decent, and the blue LED backlighting makes it even easy to type passwords in the dark. You know, like when you're breaking in to government computers.
It looks like it is designed to go with modders' computers, all black and silver and bright blue LEDs and with knobby extensions at the corners where screws hold the whole thing together. Clearly, the attempt is to look science-fiction. Neo would be proud.
And it doesn't have devil-horns or teeth or blood molded into it, the way gamerz' modder cases often do.
A very satisfying keyboard all around. Full-size inverted-T cursor keys as well as a full numeric keypad with all the accouterments that accompany from that item.
I bought it in part because it is the keyboard on which Ryan will most likely learn how to type, and I want it to be a good one.
I learned to type first on an (even then) old brown crinkle-finish Royal KMM or Quiet DeLuxe, which didn't (by design) have a full complement of keys, so that an exclamation point had to be constructed out of a period, a backspace and an apostrophe. And there was no key for the number 1, because a lower-case l served just fine for it. I don't recall whether there was a separate zero key apart from the capital O... But I seem to recall that it had fraction keys for 1/2 and 1/4, and maybe 2/3.
Mom & Dad's perfectly serviceable Royal (now probably an eBay collectors' item) suddenly lost a lot of its beige charm with my discovery [in a junk yard or abandoned office building] of what (looking back at web pages of old typewriters), must have been a Royal 10, which I recognize by its sheer black mass and the glass windows in the base (all were still intact, I'll have you know).
Knowing how things went in our house, that typewriter was probably ensconced in a cardboard box with my name on it and the ate I found it, and stashed up in the back part of the attic until they sold the place.
I spent many a curious hour in front of that Royal, fiddling around with tabs and other controls. Always was a geek, I guess.
Well, my cold medicine is starting to make the words of this message take on a strange 3D quality that is not altogether unpleasant, but maes me think it's time to call it quits and lay down.
Go quietly and lick your keyboards, if that's your thing, but get your flu shots first.
Dave _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
