Hello USAmericans, welcome to the rest of the world, where people do not do everything the same as in the USA. (eg, I have free healthcare) All over the world, QWERTY layouts are adapted to suit the languages the keyboard is used for. Maybe you are not aware that there are accented characters, but a lot of languages do use more than the 26 letters of the alphabet. Sometimes, that adaptation goes even further.
Like someone pointed to the Wikipedia-article, AZERTY is the Euro-French standard for keyboard layout. And it's much more than switching A, Z, Q and W around. You should also notice that the numbers 1, 2, ... 9, 0 are upper case characters. And there are some keys that sport different tokens, like ç or à. And some keys have 3 characters, one shifted, the other ALTGR-ed. The AltGr-key being different from the Alt-key. A QWERTY has 2 Alt keys, and AZERTY only has one. And there are the dead keys: strike ^ and 'a', and you get the letter â on your screen. Now this is all very nice for french-speaking/writing people, but virtually unnecessary for Dutch-speaking peple, from The Netherlands and from Flanders. (like I am) We have virtually no accented characters, except for the combination ë. In The Netherlands, they have a slight variation on the QWERTY layout, while the Flemish in Belgium are stuck with AZERTY-Be, rendering all computers more expensive. Anyway, In order to be accepted as a professional computer company, Tandy, in the 1980's, had to supply AZERTY keyboards for all the computers they sold as 'professional'. There was a version of the TRS-80 model III, 4, II, 16, 12, 6000 with AZERTY keyboards, but not for the CoCo. The Model 100 got a keycaps set (complete replacement for ALL the keys) and a driver ROM. Because, you have to modify the behaviour of the keyboard/screen combination, specifically because of the dead keys. There are different ways of doing that, but generally it's with an extra piece of software, a driver. The driver of the Model T came on a ROM-chip, and you had to activate it, and then you had AZERTY on your model T too. Anyway, apart from a driver (DOS or Window) or a memory-resident piece of software (Tandy Model 100) there is also the possibility of driving the keyboard in ROM. Like it was done on the TRS-80 model III/4 in cassette-version, or the adapted versions of the Olivetti M-10, that came with an AZERTY, QWERTZU or UK-QWERTY keyboard. Personally, I never used AZERTY on my TRS-80 and Tandy computers, unless they came with it (T1000+PCs) I stuck, for the Model 100 also, with the default QWERTY, because of the fact that most program makers (US) didn't take the alternative keyboards into account, creating a lot of compatibility errors. I'm not going into those compatibility problems caused by un-knowing programmers - unless you want me to - but suffice to say that I knew that, and I was used to a QWERTY layout anyway because my first computers was a Model I, so I didn't bother to switch. Maybe that's the reason why the Model 100 ROM/Character table got 'cleaned up' when it was exported to Europe. Because they had to use and display all those accented characters, I would have been very unprofessional if they didn't align right (like in the original character set) or didn't contain all the necessary characters (like PI...) That was the european view. ;-) Greetings from te TyRannoSaurus Jan-80 On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 16:20:42 -0700, Ken Pettit wrote: > Looks like the Q, W, A and Z keys came off and someone simply didn't pay any attention when popping them back on. If you look at the picture on the original box, it appears to be a standard QWERTY keyboard depicted. > > Ken > > On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 3:51 PM, Lee Kelley wrote: > >> It's not Dvorak which is what I checked out being that I don't parlyvu fransay. lol >> >> _On an other note if you set up a computer for __Dvorak and then remote controle into it from a computer that is not set for _Dvorak it can be pretty confusing when you forget about it.... >> >> On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 4:48 PM, Mike Stein wrote: >> >>> AKA AZERTY >>> >>>> ----- Original Message ----- >>>> FROM: Geoffrey Oltmans [5] >>>> TO: Model 100 Discussion [6] >>>> SENT: Friday, September 11, 2015 2:55 PM >>>> SUBJECT: Re: [M100] Keyboard Layout >>>> Looks like just a standard French keyboard layout. >>>> >>>> On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 1:12 PM, Kurt McCullum wrote: >>>> >>>>> Saw this 102 today and other than being a French version, I noticed the keyboard layout was like nothing I had ever seen before. Is anybody familiar with this arrangement of keys? >>>>> Ordinateur TANDY 102 avec boite BOXED computer [1] >>>>> >>>>> [2] >>>>> >>>>> 1 >>>>> >>>>> Ordinateur TANDY 102 avec boite BOXED computer [3] >>>>> US $67.34 Seller refurbished in Computers/Tablets & Networking, Vintage Computing, Other Vintage Computing >>>>> >>>>> View on www.ebay.com [4] >>>>> Preview by Yahoo >>>>> >>>>> Kurt >> >> -- >> >> _"I will never in my lifetime make a film that cannot be seen by the whole family"_ Arther P. 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