Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

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You can get a Sun type 6 keyboard with native USB, no adapter required. [1] I went through a few over the years before giving up on "new old stock" because they had a tendency to fail.

As I recall we have IBM to thank for the Ctrl/capslock swap. The IBM PC keyboard featured that change and was a carry over from the selectric typewriter and possibly other IBM terminal keyboards. It was very annoying for those of us with muscle memory with Ctrl where it was supposed to be. Particularly for programs like Wordstar that had heavily used keys clustered within easy reach of the pinky finger resting on control in the "right" place.

In fact there appear to be programs and macros that still allow Wordstar mode in emacs (deprecated), vim and word. So I guess it's still popular. Supposedly George RR Martin still writes in Wordstar, preferring it to modern word processors.

In fact in a similar vein of using what you know I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a Kickstarter to reproduce the space cadet keyboard or similar just for the emacs fans out there.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=type+6+usb+sun&_trksid=...

If you love Sun keyboards AND want a compact keyboard, try and find a Sun Voyager keyboard. It's a Sun keyboard, but without the (pointless) numeric keypad on the right. When I worked at Sun I managed to source a couple and still have one in my "I might need that again" bin of parts.

I didn't find any on ebay, but I did find a whole Sun Voyager system https://www.ebay.com/itm/WORKING-Rare-SUN-Voyager-SPARCstati... $700 just to get a keyboard is kinda pricy.

Like the author of the article, I like the Happy Hacker keyboard. It's compact, well built, the control key is in the correct place, has well placed arrow keys, and isn't overly expensive. I have (I hope) a lifetime supply of them. So long as I can get ps2 adaptors for whatever comes after USB.

Thanks for the heads up! I'll keep an eye out to see if any come up cheap. As I mentioned I did try to keep using Type 6s but they would usually fail after a year of use or so. I punted and bought a buckling spring keyboard although it's been sitting in a closet because I didn't want to be that guy and be the only one with a clacky clacky keyboard. Now that several of my employees brought in mechanical keyboards of their own volition I feel like I have license to do the same.

The type 6s are soft without feeling like you're typing on a marshmallow. Would love another if I could actually keep one alive.

Sun Type 6 USB is my favorite keyboard, ever. I was thrilled to find that the keymapping to Mac OS was sane. Disappointed that the special keys on the left hand side did not produce scan codes for the Mac to recognize.

It has a soft yet firm keypress feel, one which I have never felt in any other keyboard before. And most importantly, it has Control in the right place, as a proper Unix keyboard would.

In fact, it all started with the AT keyboard if I remember correctly. The original PC keyboard had it where Caps Lock is these days.

You may be right. I was selling PCs and UNIX machines from a MicroAge and remember IBM trying to get us to also flog their System/34 and Displaywrite systems along side their PCs and looking online the Displaywrite keyboard I found has control in the middle row. IBM was all over the map trying to keep PCs from gutting their minicomputer sales and their approach definitely flip flopped a few times, maybe the keyboard layout did too.

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