ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER MARCH 1991 ^^^^^ THE ORIGINAL SOURCE OF THE 105 KEY RAVE ^^^^^^^^^^^^^KEYBOARD FOR THE 99/4A ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^by Charles Good ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Lima Ohio User Group Rave now sells a 101 key AT style keyboard for use with the 99/4a. A couple of years ago, RAVE sold a different 105 key keyboard for the 99/4A which was unlike anything I have seen on other modern computers. I own one of these 105 key keyboards and published a review of this product in the November 1988 issue of BB&&P. This keyboard has a number of strange keys (the "Enhance" key for example) and the function keys are engraved with specific word processing functions that do not correspond to TI Writer. I have often wondered where RAVE got this apparently dedicated keyboard. Now I know!^^I spotted a picture of this keyboard as part of a BYTE review of the EAGLE PC. The review is by Tom Wadlow and appears on pages 236-242 of the March 1984 issue of BYTE. Quoted below are the specific parts of the Wadlow review that refer to the Eagle's keyboard: "My biggest complaint about the Eagle concerns the keyboard. The keyboard is the means by which you communicate with your computer. the better you can do that, the better you can use your computer. I am a touch typist and have used dozens of keyboards, both professionally and personally, over several years. These days, I move quite easily between my home IBM keyboard (with its accursed shift and Backspace keys) and a Lisp machine keyboard at work (which has seven different kinds of shift keys, any combination of which can be, and often is, used with a single character). As you can see, I am used to dealing with a variety of often quite peculiar keyboards. "The Eagle keyboard certainly qualifies as peculiar. While the alphanumeric keys are laid out more traditionally than on the IBM keyboard, they are not as widely spaced. My left hand always found the proper Home keys, but my right hand invariably went one key too far to the right. The Eagle keys have a mushy feel, with very little tactile feedback. This is fine if you just want to hit a key or two, but with extensive typing or word processing, it becomes quite bothersome. "There are some serious errors in the layout of the other keys. My particular favorite is the way the cursor control keys are laid out. The IBM PC places cursor control on the 2-4-6-8 keys of its numeric keypad. This layout is satisfactory, unless you want to enter numbers and move the cursor at the same time, which is not uncommon. Eagle chose to remove the cursor control keys from the numeric pad and place them between the Enter key and the numbers. So there, in a vertical column, you have Up, Right, and Down. The Backspace key does double duty as Left, but you have to type Shift-Backspace to get the proper Left code. This layout is not very intuitive, not to mention being somewhat uncomfortable, and you spend a lot of time rubbing out characters every time you want to move left. "A little experimentation produced the undocumented fact that the 2-4-6-8 keys on the number pad do produce cursor control codes when shifted. Unfortunately, neither the Shift-Lock nor the Alpha-Lock keys affect the number keys at all, so you must always hold down a Shift key to use this feature. "Many of the function keys are labeled with functions for one or more of the Eagle applications programs. For example, hitting the function key labeled Files in Eagle-Calc displays a directory of the current disk. while I have nothing against this per se, it seems to me that a general purpose keyboard and a nice set of cardboard overlays would save us all the trouble of explaining to a novice why the Files key doesn't work with dBASE II or some other non-Eagle product. "Eagle does have one special key that I do like a great deal- the Help key. And it does exactly what you would expect it to when you use it with Eagle software. "Unlike the IBM keyboard, the Eagle keyboard has mechanically locked Shift-Lock and Alpha-lock keys that actually give some indication of the state of the keyboard. It is just a hint, though, since a program can set these locks in software. Thus, under some all too frequent circumstances, the actions of the two lock keys can be reversed, so that lowercase can be achieved only by keeping the Shift-Lock down. [I ran into this problem a couple of times on my RAVE keyboard, and it is very disturbing. CG] "The keyboard has lots of other peculiarities, such as the numeric keypad with convenient Plus, Minus, and Times keys, but no Divide. Or the Enhance key, which is as big as the Enter key and takes up a space that would be a pretty good location for a correctly configured set of cursor control keys. Enhance is used only in Eagle-Writer, and I really had to dig in the manual to find out where. But the major peculiarity of this keyboard is that it exists at all. Several companies are making good money selling properly designed keyboards for the IBM PC. If Eagle has simply chosen one of those keyboards, it would be in a very enviable position compared to the IBM PC. Perhaps the "Not invented here" syndrome isn't limited to IBM [or TI...CG]. As Eagle's keyboard exists today, the only people that will benefit by its presence are the companies that sell Eagle compatible replacement boards." I don't think the Eagle computer sold well, especially after the above review was originally published. You don't read much about Eagle in the literature. It looks like RAVE picked up surplus Eagle keyboards and sold them to 99ers. About a year ago I removed my 105 key RAVE keyboard and reinstalled the original gray plastic keyboard that came with my console. I did this for several reasons, not the least of which is the mushy feel of the RAVE 105 key keyboard. Having used the EAGLE/RAVE keyboard for two years, I can agree with all the comments quoted above. I like my original TI keyboard better. .PL 1