4 ms·

The keyboards really are nice to type on. Though for the life of me I can't figure out why, on a UNIX system, they put the pipe character in such a weird place.

by _moof 5y ago

The keyboards really are nice to type on. Though for the life of me I can't figure out why, on a UNIX system, they put the pipe character in such a weird place. It's above the keypad. If you (the general you, not you specifically, since you probably already know this) get your hands on a NeXT keyboard and want to use it with a modern system, Adafruit has a guide here for building a USB adapter with an Arduino: https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-next-keyboard-with-arduino-micro https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-next-keyboard-with-arduino-mi...

foobiekr 5y ago
Both the mouse and keyboard were banes of my existence as a lab owner. They failed constantly.
- _moof 5y ago
  Bleh, sorry to hear that. Never had any trouble with mine. Maybe you had too many college students? :)
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    :-) well, it was a college lab. I had three big problems with the NeXT systems. One was the MO; that was dire and terrible and they should never have shipped it. This was very rapidly fixed by adding HDs to every system as soon as we realized what boat anchors the MO-only systems were. The second was the poor HW quality of the mice and keyboards. They simply broke a lot more frequently than the PCs, Suns (even the cheap pink/grey ones that I've forgotten the name of), SGIs and Dec systems. The last was that we were an AFS university and the NeXT systems, if you accidentally browsed the AFS top level directory, would hang the browser for at least 30 minutes. Super unpleasant if you needed to head to class since a locking screen saver did not kick in even after the browser recovered. As a side effect, we'd have students yanking the power cord which itself was not always something that the HD slabs recovered from. That said, I loved them, everything about them, and there has never been anything like that. The Sun-vs-NeXT thing was night and day.
thought_alarm 5y ago
On US-English keyboards, the pipe character is in the regular spot, but the back-quote/tilde key is on the number pad instead of its usual location above the Tab key. The Escape key is above Tab (Because there are no function keys). But it wasn't a problem, because if you typed "Shift+Escape" it would translate to the tilde character, just as if the back-quote/tilde key was in its proper location. I always thought that was a clever touch.

by _moof 5y ago

foobiekr 5y ago

Both the mouse and keyboard were banes of my existence as a lab owner. They failed constantly.

_moof 5y ago
Bleh, sorry to hear that. Never had any trouble with mine. Maybe you had too many college students? :)
- foobiekr 5y ago
  :-) well, it was a college lab. I had three big problems with the NeXT systems. One was the MO; that was dire and terrible and they should never have shipped it. This was very rapidly fixed by adding HDs to every system as soon as we realized what boat anchors the MO-only systems were. The second was the poor HW quality of the mice and keyboards. They simply broke a lot more frequently than the PCs, Suns (even the cheap pink/grey ones that I've forgotten the name of), SGIs and Dec systems. The last was that we were an AFS university and the NeXT systems, if you accidentally browsed the AFS top level directory, would hang the browser for at least 30 minutes. Super unpleasant if you needed to head to class since a locking screen saver did not kick in even after the browser recovered. As a side effect, we'd have students yanking the power cord which itself was not always something that the HD slabs recovered from. That said, I loved them, everything about them, and there has never been anything like that. The Sun-vs-NeXT thing was night and day.

thought_alarm 5y ago

On US-English keyboards, the pipe character is in the regular spot, but the back-quote/tilde key is on the number pad instead of its usual location above the Tab key. The Escape key is above Tab (Because there are no function keys). But it wasn't a problem, because if you typed "Shift+Escape" it would translate to the tilde character, just as if the back-quote/tilde key was in its proper location. I always thought that was a clever touch.