I didn’t mind the speccy’s rubber keyboard, although it was certainly not popular. I even wrote a couple of essays on it for my Postgraduate Diploma… in Computer Science. Not bad for a 48K machine!
The thing about the machines of that era was the openness of the architecture. The manuals specified what every byte in the 16K reserved for the operating system was for. Even early DOS commands could be accessed on the PC XT/AT (then IBM tried to lock things away with SAA, and wondered where their market base vanished to).
These days, who knows what lurks in the gigabytes of OS?
