I wish I'd been able to "acquire" one of the ACT Apricots that my dad's old work had. They were "portable" in the sense they had a handle very firmly attached, and I think the keyboard (which had a little strip of hotkeys with an LCD screen above - waaay ahead of you, Apple) clipped into the bottom of the unit.

The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!

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xuhu 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why are the Shift and Caps Lock keys shaped like that ? Is it because those wide keys cannot be pressed from the ends ?

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andyjohnson0 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I believe you're right. From my limited memory of that period, it was a mechanical constraint.

Keycaps tended to be molded with a hollow cylinder or stalk on their base, which fitted through a snug round aperture on the keyboard base and pressed against a spring or other restraint. Pressing the key down against the spring actuated a pcb-mounted push-switch (or bridged a pair of adjacent connectors on the pcb) that provided the keypress signal. Pressing a wide key off-centre would cause the plastic stalk to bind against the enclosing aperture. Forcing the user to press direcly above the stalk mitigates this - hence the raised part of the keycap.

There is a stack exchange question about this at [1].

As to why the shift keys were wider to begin with, I'm not sure. Perhaps a consequence of the lack of the mechanical constraints that forced typewriter keyboards into a strict grid due to the interleaving of the lever arms. Some keyboards, notably the Commodore PET, didn't use wide shift keys [2] though.

It is worth noting that keyboards in that era were machine-specific, and often hard-wired to the main system box. Afaik standardisation and interoperability didn't happen until RS232 and, later, ps2 keyboards were introduced.

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/16471/why...

[2] and let me just say here that the PET keyboard was truly awful, even by 80s standards. Just shamefully terrible.

	▲	nkali 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The keyboard on the Apricot uses round capacitive foam pads under the keys. This means the keys had to be square, or they needed a mechanical thing like the space button on the photo here: https://www.baffo71.com/details.php?id_img=7 So, I think it is a mechanical/electrical limitation.

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ErroneousBosh 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have no idea, but I do have a PC/AT keyboard with similarly-shaped keys. They have the usual "square horseshoe" / "anti-roll bar for Matchbox cars" arrangement underneath so they don't rock when you press the end.

I think it's just what they did in the 80s.

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qingcharles 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know how many of these Apricot PCs I had as a kid. By the late eighties I was buying them for £1 a piece second hand as nobody wanted them (nobody could figure out why they didn't run PC software). I'd already had a couple of old Sirius 1 computers for a while, so I'd amassed a lot of "DOS compatible" programs that would work, and there was always the hope with every new PC you bought it would have some random new gem hidden on the HDD that you hadn't seen before.

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nkali 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The model I have is exactly like this, with a handle and a clip. You can still get one! :)

	▲	ErroneousBosh 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yours is the later one with the hard disk, the ones that my dad had at work were beige with two floppies. They also had some Sirius 1s, one of which had a hard disk. Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting closed and empty.