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From: Gavin.Eadie@f20.n226.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Gavin Eadie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: New Extended Keyboards
Message-ID: <566.2783DE77@busker.fidonet.org>
Date: 28 Dec 90 23:46:27 GMT
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Reply-To: Gavin_Eadie@UM.CC.UMich.EDU

In article <10774@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> patten@uhunix1.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu 
(Brian Michael Patten) writes:
> How many others on the net have experienced these kinds of problems,
> and does Apple have a solution?

I'm interested to hear that this problem is still there on the new 
keyboards. This first arose for me in April when my wife, with her new 
IIcx, complained that she couldn't type "stop" on her Mac. Being a 
techo-jockey with 25 years of programming under my belt, I decried this 
silliness, after all I'd been using a Mac since January 1984 etc etc ...

Well, of course, she was right. I reported the problem to Apple Developer 
Technical Support and got a nice message back saying, in effect, "Don't be 
silly!". I let it drop for a while till the same problem was mentioned on 
usenet, at which point I realised there was something systematic going on.

I started to experiment. I discovered that, if you type really fast, 
taking the best advantage of key rollover, the keyboard really *does* jam 
temporarily. I got back to Mac DTS with instructions on exactly how to 
reproduce the problem. This time they tried it and got it to happen for 
them too. There was no workaround (except type more slowly), the bug was 
suspected in the keyboard ROM and probably would not be there in the next 
keyboard.

When I got System 7.0 beta 1, I tested for this again (just to see if it 
was system related) and discovered it was still present. I passed this 
information to Apple and got a snotty reply from DTS.

Sad to say, it seems to still exist in the new keyboards (though I've not
been able to test this for myself) and so I'm going back to Apple with 
this new information. I've not chased this too hard so far (since I've 
almost not believed it could be true), but it seems like the time to 
escalate this. I agree with the sentiment that when you spend a lot of 
money of a computer ($5000 in my case) it ought to accurately collect what 
you type on the keyboard.

I'll give Apple one more try  since I now have the name of the keyboard 
ROM person to see if they can offer a better answer than those I've had to 
date. Fortunately, I have all the DTS and usenet correspondence on this 
matter still in files

Gavin Eadie, U of Michigan, Information Systems

 + Organization: U of Michigan Information Systems

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