smbx keyboards

[Kent Pitman <kmp@harlequin.com>]

It's been said several times implicitly in the "May Symbolics thrive..."
conversation, but I want it to be said nice and plainly so that it doesn't 
get lost amidst all the other text, in hopes that Symbolics has the good sense 
to notice and follow up:

 Whatever else Symbolics might have plans to do in the future, it should
 make sure it continues to make and sell good keyboards (or to assure that
 some third party does so).  The Sun needs an equivalent of the
 ADB-box-adapted smbx keyboard now available for the Mac.  And indeed,
 the Mac version needs to be sold independently of Genera for people
 with no intent to buy a Macivory.  I think lots of non-Genera customers 
 would like the overall layout, and certainly as Genera transitions to more
 standard platforms, the keyboard will be the one piece of not-soon-to-obsolete
 hardware that people will truly miss.

I would certainly ask my company to buy a Symbolics-style keyboard for me to use
on my SPARC, just to improve my typing throughput, even though we don't use
Genera here.  It wouldn't hurt if it had a few extra keys off to the edges, too,
so that special compatibility sequences wouldn't be as necessary--but that's not
critical.  Any way you cut it, commodity keyboards are the pits, especially for 
control and meta ...