Back in the Windows 3.1 days we used a special serial cable to hook two PCs together.

Back in the windows 98 days we used a special parallel cable to hook two PCs together.

I remember back in the day when we had to hook two abaci together with string! That was our "Internet", you coddled young whippersnappers!

And we were glad to have it, too!

My husband and I used to hook up machines with a serial cable so we could game together.

While I'm not as old as MM, I remember the days when we had to use steam pipe to hook two steam-powered difference engines together. Then of course we had to deal with the incompatibilities between coal-fired steam-powered difference engines and wood-burning steam-powered difference engines. And then the headaches of enterprise-wide conversion to oil-fired boilers....

In my day the LAN was made by banging rocks together.

A scary trip down memory lane: The 10 Worst PC Keyboards of All Time

I agree that the PC Jr. keyboard is the worst of all time, but I don't think the C-64 belongs on the list at all.

One glance at it reveals three major flaws. It was visually confusing, with too many symbols printed on each key.

The extra symbols were graphics characters for BASIC, and were hardly ever used unless one was programming their own games. They weren't on the key faces, and a touch typist wouldn't care anyway.

The computer's anti-ergonomic 2-inch height made it extremely hard on the wrists of untrained typists.

Not much could be done about it, since the keyboard was the whole computer. I never found it a problem.

And the keyboard's layout leaves much to be desired, with numerous examples of poor key placement. For example, the Home/Clear key sat directly to the left of Delete (Backspace), resulting in users' making repeated accidental hits and sending the cursor back up to the top of the screen.

Apparently "numerous" = 1.

In addition, the layout was peppered with an unusually large number of nonstandard keys such as Run/Stop and Restore.

I may have been wrong. Apparently "numerous" may also = 2. This same could also be said about current Mac keyboards.

Luckily, most C64 owners remained oblivious to these problems: More often than not, they used the C64 for playing games with joysticks, saving the heavy computing work for dad's IBM PC.

I wrote a lab manual on my 64. The snide jerk seems to miss the point that in 1982 there really wasn't such a thing as a standard computer keyboard layout yet. And in it's favor, it had the function keys to one side, which I've always preferred.

For my part, I despise the newer keyboards coming out from Microsoft and Logitech where they've rearranged the keys above the cursor keys from horizontal layout to vertical.

If most users are oblivious to the problems, how bad can they be?

I didn't see my cherished ZX Spectrum on their, although Sinclair got props.

I dunno--some keyboards were awful (having the letter on the key is a good idea), but some were just clunky and old.

DX, do you have a link to one of those re-orged keyboards? Have they made the function keys into two columns instead of the one row?

Have they made the function keys into two columns instead of the one row?

Nope. [link]

Oh, I see what you mean. No idea where my brain was when I asked about the function keys.

I don't use those keys that often so I don't mind. No, I take that back. Need to be able to get to page down and page up quickly and accurately.