deskthority

I´m not sure if it´s been posted here before:

http://www.computerhistory.org/collecti ... &t=objects

nice collection they have going on.

I didn't know this. Thanks for the link. But when i see this



i can't wait for Round 5!

Nice link. Thanks for posting. There's lots of neat stuff over there, such as this detached Atari 800 keyboard:



There are even a few early 80's keyboards with touchpads!


I knew the touchpad was around in the early 80's, but never knew it was integrated into keyboards back then.

Edit: Once again, Xerox was ahead of the times. The Xerox 860 of 1980 had an integrated touchpad too:

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/xerox860/

Wow, I'm in love with the bank of keys between the alphas and the circular (!!) trackpad. Now I'm thinking about what it would be like to have an auxiliary keyboard with function keys tailored to Emacs (mark, yank, transpose, advance char/word/line/paragraph, etc.).

I've seen a couple of those Xerox boards (in slightly different variants) and they are absolute beasts! Way bigger than beam springs. Solid metal, pyramid cross section, and wide as all hell. They're the biggest two keyboards in the museum over here, and alas not in nearly as nice shape as that one above.

Xerox called that circular pad The Cat, by the way. Capacitative something or another… but really just a pun!

There's lots of neat stuff over there

those pages just go to show what incredible hardware was built in the past and some of it is still out there somewhere...

It's funny … a schoolfriend had a Toshiba colour 386 laptop, and the trackball was a clamp-on attachment that you had to carry separately. It wasn't even integrated like it was with Apple products. Despite the evident bulk that an integrated trackball created, and the hassle of an external one, laptops didn't get integrated capacitive touchpads for a very long time. Psion introduced a notebook touchpad with the Mobile Computer series (MC 200/400 but not MC 600) in 1989, but I'm not sure how that worked. I know that you physically clicked the pad, but I forget whether that was to register a mouse move or mouse click; I do remember that it used absolute co-ordinates.

As far as I understand it, capacitive touchpads are inherently multitouch, and you need circuitry to combine all the sensory readings to figure out where your finger actually is (as illustrated by the Synaptics Mood Pad) so it may have taken a long time to miniaturise all the circuitry required to figure all that out. Just guessing.

These days I just get annoyed at the gloss trackpads that don't get on with my skin chemistry — my fingers tends to stick and skip across a gloss surface. Matte is better, and teflon is better still, but I guess for cheapness, companies figure that a gloss surface is easier than teflon coating.

I like this colour scheme

http://www.computerhistory.org/collecti ... /102711741

Anybody have one of these?


This could very easily be misinterpreted:

Anybody have one of these?

that´s quite a layout

Space Shuttle?

This could very easily be misinterpreted:

I don´t get it

mr_a500 wrote:Anybody have one of these?

I've got two right handers,not quite sure how that happened...

seebart wrote:

This could very easily be misinterpreted:

I don´t get it

We English speakers are a simple people. If it's a joke: it's a dick joke!

Now I just need one of those badges for my, uh, Honeywell!

It's not a dick joke! I had breasts on my mind when I said that. Breasts, man - breasts!

(mmm... I seem to have breasts on my mind quite often...)

Sadly I am the last person on the planet to suggest that you should get out more often ;-)

Jeeez you brits....

He's Canadian, your honour …