They’re not?
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I approve!
A line of smaller keys underneath the spacebar would make it yet better. Another line of flatter keys between the numerics and the functions would also add more oomph.
…and now, laptop version please!
(Why can’t laptops have unified specs for the keyboards, so they and the touchpads can be freely replaced, independent on laptop’s type? I for one am willing to go with a centimeter thicker laptop just for this.)
(Todo: try out, mod the laptop hinges.)
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Sigh . . . I dream of a paperless office. I sit next to the printer in my office and that bloody thing runs allllll day (mostly printing purchase orders from customers). However, I am a big fan of email, because otherwise I’d spend a lot of time on the phone, which I hate.
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Administrative personnel are more effective.
Managers have access to more up-to-date information.
Decision-making is easier.
I find these statements to be true. Completely true.
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We had some foreign students who got hung up on “push any key.” They asked “Which key is the ‘any’ key?” So we just pointed to the tilde key in the upper left hand corner.
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Yeah, well I’d like to punch more than a key, sometimes. Idiot programmers, documentation writers, online help and FAQ creators. To name just a few.
Users. Don’t forget the users…
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I took my first programming class using these. Even in graduate school, a stack of cards was still the only way to book the mainframe.
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Contact Mr. Laurie Reeves?
No wonder you’re confused.
cool. I read about this in In The Beginning Was The Command Line, but I’ve never used any of those machines. The Commodore PET computers were out when I was in first grade, so we had keyboards, CRT screens, and cassette drives for my first interface.
Yeah your program was a stack of cards held together by a rubber band, which you handed to the guy behind the counter at the computer lab.
At the end of the semester, people threw their cards from the top floors of the dorms.
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Something like this?
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As a kid, I remember going over to the Goldfish Bowl in Birmingham University to meet up with my Mum who would be inputting her data into the Mainframe… box after box of punch cards. My Dad would come home with tales of wrestling with miles of paper tape and, later, magnetic discs weighing a few stone apiece… There were giants in the earth in those days…
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Don’t forget the “chad”, the punched-out bits of card that were collected in a bin under the cardpunch. Tiny, stiff pieces of paper prone to building up a static charge.
Opportunities mischief abounded.
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The punch tape “holes” are even smaller in size and bigger in fun 
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Haha great, I was thinking of writing a letter to Honeywell Office Automation Systems, at Three Newton Executive Park Drive, but on Google Maps it looks now like a bunch of apartments.
I really need to notify some people immediately about a fast-breaking development!
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Bad plan.
I used to work in a self paced astronomy program where we carried all the old tests to a recycling facility at the end of the semester. We didn’t make that much money off of it. It was mostly a responsible way of disposing of tests that would avoid cheating in the future. One year, we acquired several boxes of Hollerith cards. The weight and quality of the card stock meant that we made vastly more money than before. It was actually worth hauling them down there.
My mom was working at United and my father at TWA, probably around 1970 when airlines were a big user of mainframes and dial in modems. Dad didnt believe mom that she could eyeball punchcards until he made a custom one for her. “If you can read this you are pretty good.” and she was. I think he was jealous.
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