A Short Story of the Keyboard
from the November 1982 issue of Byte magazine
by Phil Lemmons
Keyboards are meant to let our fingers do the talking, but more often they make us swear aloud. Every manufacturer seems to want its keyboard to be unmistakably different from any other. The only keys that seem to be sacred and immovable are badly placed: the familiar QWERTYUIOP and its companion rows of the alphabet. The Shift and Return keys occasionally stray, and the control keys and function keys wander from one end of the keyboard to the other.