Re: The best Dell keyboard ever made

Hi!

What ever happened to the 121 key keyboards?  I have a Gateway,
circa 1996, that had such a keyboard, and which I still have today,
that had an additional function key grouping on the left and an
eight way directional pad (with center spacebar) where the arrow
keys normally are.

That and the old IBM "host connect" keyboard are the only ones I see
regularly with 120+ keys.

I have one of the Gateway 'boards that is like the one you describe,
as well as a generic "no name" board that is set up much the same way.
Whether I could find either one in a timely fashion is debatable. :-)

I suspect that the main reason for their demise has something to do
with cost of manufacturing and customer feedback. I would suspect that
large numbers of customers either never noticed (yes, really) or never
saw fit to say "hey that's a great idea!" to Gateway.

There are lots of "elite" keyboards out there, but the only thing I've
found that even holds a distant candle to the tried and true Model M
are the HP/Keytronic boards that were sold with HP Vectra (and
probably other) computers for a while. They are quiet rubber dome
'boards, but they are *very good* quiet rubber dome 'boards at that.

William
.

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