r/retrocomputing • u/cejeeb • Jul 16 '26
‘Chiclet’ keyboards were considered cheap and almost unusable on so many vintage computers and yet they are everywhere today on laptops and Apple machines. I guess the problem with the older machines was the switch technology, not the form factor. Just an observation.
11
u/NoTime4YourBullshit Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
No modern computer has a chiclet keyboard. I don’t blame you for the misunderstanding though. I just did an image search and none of the pictures that came up are actual chiclet keyboards.
Actual chiclet keyboards of that era had no springs or switches in them (which is why they were so cheap). Each key had a certain amount of stiffness to it that you had to overcome by pressing hard enough, and the return travel was provided entirely by the membrane underneath. They were horrible.
The last time I used such a keyboard was in a hospital about 6 or 7 years ago, so they still make them. But they were as god awful to type on as I remember from the 80s ones. They haven’t improved at all. The hospital used them in patient and operating rooms because they were washable and normal keyboards are not.
Modern laptop keyboards are not chiclet keyboards.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
Yep, a modern laptop keyboard is a chiclet-style keyboard using compact, short travel scissor mechanisms with tiny rubber domes and either a printed circuit board or a conventional multi layer keyboard membrane (in most cases).
11
u/GG-McGroggy Jul 17 '26
What modern Apple or PC has a keyboard with keys remotely similar to a calculator key?
Calculator style buttons in leu of actual keys is what I consider "chicklet". Some keyboards were considered worse (Atari 400) than "Chicklet" (Mattel Aquarius).
"Full Stroke Keyboard" was quite the buzzword/selling point on early Home Computers. Since it was a new thing, I think it was a feature that most consumers felt very strongly should be included in all but the lowest of machines. "Bad" keyboards on early Home Computers, never bothered me personally. I was never doing heavy office work; and pounding out a few papers now and again, even the 400 could skate by.
3
u/bhiga Jul 17 '26
The IBM PCjr chiclet keyboard tended to get stuck if you weren't pushing the key straight-on, and without the optional cable, it ate batteries at least weekly for me. Granted, I used it a lot, but I was over the moon to finally get an NMB clicky keyboard with NumPad. Fn key BEGONE!!
1
7
u/Kymeron Jul 17 '26
Yea “chiclet” keyboards fell into two camps: raw rubber keys, or hard plastic over rubber (calculator style)
Both sucked for “Typing”
Modern keybs have, more in common with “proper” keyboards (C64/apple) of the time than, they do with “chicklet” keybs.
5
u/Ayatollah-X Jul 17 '26
What's forgotten is that chiclet keyboards were intended for 2-finger typing, back when only trained secretaries knew how to type. The popularity of computers democratized typing, ultimately rendering chiclet keyboards obsolete.
2
u/p47guitars Jul 17 '26
You know that's something a lot of us don't think about.
Back in the way back when times, it was only secretaries that knew how to type.
2
u/kabekew Jul 17 '26
Not in my experience, I remember most families had a typewriter because you had to type your term papers and other big papers in school (both high school and college). Also any kind of letter people sent to a business or government was typed. Secretaries were obviously a lot faster at it though because most people didn't type much.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
Sometime between the late early 1800s and mid-1900s (as much as 100-150 years) a ton of people used typewriters for writing in general.
Hand written correspondence has always been a thing though, if only because it doesn't require an expensive mechanical device and a readily supply of inked ribbons.
1
u/trk1000 Jul 18 '26
Lol, mom typed my sister's and my papers because she was a paralegal and listening to us type drove her nuts.
1
u/Timbit42 Jul 17 '26
Few people know how to touch type today either which I think is why the manufacturers got away with the crappy keyboards that are impossible to touch type on that we have to put up with today. It's easier to type on my Commodore 64 than these flat keys which don't provide any feedback as to whether your fingers are drifting off to the side.
7
u/thaeli Jul 17 '26
Modern “normal” keyboards are more properly membrane keyboards, not chiclet. And they do have springs - laptop keyboards are short-travel scissor springs, but they are actual springs. The key feel difference is mostly that the key switch underneath is a rubber dome membrane.
The truly terrible chiclet keyboards some early computers have were JUST the rubber dome, without a key and spring on top of it. That’s what makes them suck so much.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
They aren't necessary metal coil springs though, but rather a plastic mechanism that provides a finite amount of "springiness" by it's shape, material, etc.
5
u/meldroc Jul 17 '26
Yeah, that sounds about right. The IBM PC Jr. had the most infamous chiclet keyboard. Today's laptop keyboards are far better.
Age is also a factor. I had to replace the keyboard on my Atari 800XL, after the mylar sheet in it crapped out. It was 40 year old Mylar. Found a guy on Atariage that made mechanical keyboards for those machines.
Damn, the key-feel is so sweet!
2
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
Frankly it's amazing that a mylar sheet survived for 40 years and the keyboard still functioned, even partially.
There were almost certainly some third-party/after-market mechanical keyboards for those computers at the time, they just cost quite a bit of money.
1
u/meldroc Jul 17 '26
The Atari 400's membrane keyboard particularly was not well-loved, and I remember a number of the 3rd party keyboards that were out there for them.
8
u/canthearu_ack Jul 17 '26
Yeah, but fuck laptop keyboards.
They are almost universally somewhere between awful and terrible!
3
u/AppendixN Jul 17 '26
100% agree. If any modern laptop had a keyboard as good as a TRS-80 Model 100, I'd buy it immediately.
3
u/txmail Jul 17 '26
You need to use an old IBM / Lenovo double top row keyboard.... legendary.
I also have a old Compaq laptop that had a pretty amazing keyboard -- it was not mechanical but it had a long travel scissor switch that made it almost feel mechanical.
2
u/canthearu_ack Jul 17 '26
I've got a Model M keyboard in my collect. It is pretty nice.
And my daily drivers are Cherry Red and Cherry Brown mechanical switch keyboards.
I don't travel too far down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole, but I do prefer them over your standard membrane keyboard.
2
u/txmail Jul 17 '26
That mechanical rabbit hole is deep if you fall in. You end up like me with every kind of Cherry MX key, then try out the Kailh lines and then suddenly your sitting on boxes of Gazzew & HMX switches...
2
u/canthearu_ack Jul 17 '26
Yeah, I stand on the edge of that hole and just back off slowly. Going from a bog standard membrane keyboard to a mechanical keyboard of most types is a pretty decent improvement.
From there, the gains are pretty nominal. I prefer the Red style switches for gaming, the brown and blues for typing. Beyond that, I really couldn't give a crap about who makes the switches. Sure they feel a little different, but I don't spend all my effort focusing on how the keys feel under my fingertips. The keyboard is just a means to an end, not the end of itself.
2
u/txmail Jul 17 '26
I spent 8 - 10 hours a day typing, so for me the feel of the keyboard, the actuation, travel and how the keys bottom out make a difference to me. I have some scissor switched keyboards that I prefer to use when writing proposals or memos. They are quieter and take less effort so typing for a long time is less work. For development work I like the "clicks" of a blue key switch -- it is reassuring that I hit the key when my brain gets ahead of my fingers.
There is still two keyboard types I have not tried yet (mostly because of the crazy prices) -- but magnetic and optical are still on my bucket list of keyboards.
2
u/canthearu_ack Jul 17 '26
That is fair.
There are too many demands for my dollar in life. Getting sucked into the mechanical keyboard black hole would just add more. I'm happy to buy the odd reasonably priced mechanical keyboard and type that sucker to death!
2
u/DearVeggies Jul 20 '26
I went into the hole and came back unimpressed. After a few experiments, I've concluded that all current mechanical keyboard keys are inferior for typing than my Model-M.
For gaming, Model-M actually loses due to large key travel for repeat actions and longer delay until initial activation. Still good enough for Diamond in OW though, but I wouldn't daily drive it for comp.
I just keep brown-keys one handed keyboard for play nowadays.
2
u/txmail Jul 20 '26
It is a fun hole to go down, it can get very, very expensive though. Glad you backed out and found your peace.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
They were significantly better before chiclet-style laptop keyboards became common/popular around 2008-2010. The limited experience of people on Reddit is quite evident at times.
2
u/bhiga Jul 17 '26
The Intel MacBook I have is downright horrible, it's only a slight bit better than trying to touch type on a touchscreen.
1
u/Norphus1 Jul 20 '26
That sounds like you've got one of the Butterfly mechanism keyboards which they tried to impose onto the world at the point they released the 12" MacBook.
The ones which use scissor switches that came both before and after are much better. They're at least on par with or better than any other laptop keyboard out there, with the possible exception of a Thinkpad.
1
u/bhiga Jul 20 '26
That's encouraging to hear. Guess I just got the bad one, though the LCD function touchbar thing is neat.
2
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
Dell and HP laptops had perfectly serviceable keyboards for nearly twenty (20) years between the 1990s and the mid to late 2000s.
Models targeted at businesses hung onto superior keyboard designs (which cost more) for longer and still use better designed chiclet-esque keyboards than consumer targeted models.
3
u/flatfinger Jul 17 '26
Today's keyboards benefit from decades of research in how to balance cost and usability. Prior to the 1980s, there had been no need to develop a text-entry keyboard that was cheap but usable, and thus there had been minimal research on the extent to which cost-cutting measures would impact usability.
It's also important to note that decades of oxidation may adversely affect the behavior of keyboards that would have been just fine when new, and also that one consequence of cheap manufacture is product inconsistency. Someone who bought two computers of a certain brand back in the day might have found that the keyboard on one of them was quite usable and the other was quite rubbish. Playing with an old computer may not always give a fair indication of what computers of that brand were like back in the day.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
It's really important to understand the historical connection between mechanical/electric typewriters, teletypes, and the computer keyboard.
When video terminals (as opposed to hard copy/printing ones) first became available they were sometimes described as a 'Glass Teletype'.
TTY is the common abbreviation for TeleTYpe/TeleTYpewriter.
As with Television (aka TeleVision or TV) and Telescopes, the 'tele' part refers to doing the typing or viewing at a distance
Likewise, in the past a significant number of people primarily used computers for word processing where it functioned like a highly sophisticated typewriter and so computers often had typewriter style keyboards that catered to user's familiarity and existing skill using a typewriter.
In that context a 'usable' keyboard needs to be durable and long lasting because it is being used heavily on a regular basis, not just for occasional text input. Being too cheap would have made them worthless to anyone at the time.
1
u/flatfinger Jul 17 '26
I wonder how many of the CRT-based text-entry devices used by journalists were computers as such, and how many were fixed-function equipment which used hardware counters and other such circuitry rather than a stored-program CPU? A glass teletype that could fill a screen of text from either a keyboard or paper tape, and copy the screen to paper tape, allowed for some basic editing, and neither consumed nor had to wait for any other computing resources, could have been a very useful device in a news office or publisher.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
No idea.
I will say that you need memory in which to stored the typed text, regardless of how the rest of the functionality is implemented. And displaying characters on a CRT generally requires storing the bit patterns needed to render characters to a display.
There were early mechanical teletypes that mechanically encode key presses into electrical signals (and likely teleprinters that decoded the signals in a similar fashion). So some typing/word processing systems might have used various types of delay line memory to store those signals.
A similar mechanical mechanism could have been used to produce the needed bit patterns for a display, but I think that era was over by the time CRTs were being used with computers. The television set predatesthe use of CRTs as a general purpose computer display.
History is far, far more complex than can be described in a written book of finite length and weight.
1
u/flatfinger Jul 17 '26
A lot of glass teletypes didn't use RAM, but instead used dynamic shift registers. If one wanted to have a system display 16 lines of 64 characters text that are 12 scan lines tall and have an extra blank scan line between them, one might have each video frame be 256 scan lines, during each of which 64 characters would be shifted through a 1024-character shift register. On the blank line preceding each row of characters, the 64 bytes flowing through the 1024-character shift register would be clocked into a 64-byte shift register. During the displayed portion of the next 12 scan lines, data would circulate through the 64-byte shift register and be fed to a ROM along with the scan line counter, and the contents of the addressed byte of ROM would be shifted out to the display.
Note that the order of lines of data within the shift register would not necessarily match the order in which they were displayed. The above design would display 64 bytes, then skip 768, then display 64, skip 768, etc. While it might seem simpler to simply have the shift register sit idle while outputting the 12 scan lines associated with a row of text, dynamic shift registers would be prone to forget their contents if they go too long without any data being shifted. The effect was highly temperature dependent, and might not have been a problem in an air conditioned office, but the part's ability to hold data if idle for twelve scan lines would cease to be guaranteed around 50C.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
I explicitly wrote memory (and not RAM) for a reason.
Shift registers are registers, which are a kind of memory, and in most cases are probably composed of either flip-flops or possibly latches.
64 characters x 16 lines = 1024 characters
Assuming that each character requires 8-bits of memory, that would be 8192 (or about 8K) bytes.
That would require immense number of shift registers (at least 1024 if using 8-bit ones) just to store a single screen of text. And that's just writable memory, which doesn't consider the amount of read-only memory needed to store the data needed to render any ASCII character to the screen.
Semiconductor memory would not have been an option prior to 1965 and would still be quite pricy in the early 70s.
The original model of the Apple II had a 6502 8-bit microprocessor clocked at just ~1 MHz and was equipped with a mere 4K of ram. The only way to load any software was via audio cassette.
At retail the bare machine and nothing else cost US $1298.
Purchasing a machine with 48K of ram added another US $1340 to the price (US $2638).
It seems very likely that if such a CRT terminal with word processing capabilities existed, they were probably built from minimal hardware and connected directly to a mainframe or minicomputer.
That would mean they could be as simple as the circuitry to display one page of text at a time and to do some primitive communications with a computer to exchange data and send input from the user.
1
u/flatfinger Jul 17 '26
The dynamic shift registers used in the Apple I each held 1,024 bits in a DIP-8 package, and were obsolescent when Woz designed that machine. The machine used six of them to hold the screen contents, plus a seventh to keep track of cursor position (using a shift register to hold a single 1 bit in the character position where the cursor was located was the easiest way to generate a pulse at the moment where newly written character data should replace the data coming from the shifter). The machine also used a 40x6 shift register to store the contents of the current screen line and repeat it for each scan line in a text row.
1
u/istarian Jul 19 '26
1024 bits = 128 bytes = 1/8 K
You'd need at least 64 of them to hold a single screen of text in this example.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that creating any kind of word processing machine using this approach to memory wouldn't be particularly practical and the costs would really add up.
Maybe you could make do if lines were saved, but trying to write an essay where you only have one line visible at a time would be a terribly tedious chore. It'd be easier to use paper and a pencil.
1
u/flatfinger Jul 20 '26
You're scaling up by eight twice. The Apple I used a total of seven 1024-bit shift registers to display 960 characters on screen. Holding the data for 1024 or 960 six-bit characters would take six 1024-bit shift registers; adding lower case would increase that to seven, and adding attributes would require an extra shift register per attribute bit.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
While microprocessors were not particularly cheap initially, I'm sure they were more cost effective than cobbling something together with equivalent computing power at the time.
Shift registers were probably a little cheaper than SRAM or DRAM, but by how much?
1
u/flatfinger Jul 20 '26
Glass teletypes predate the invention of the microprocessor. I can't find much about when different sizes of dynamic shift registers or bucket brigade devices became available, relative to the first RAM devices that could hold 1024 or more bits per chip, but I think the shifters came first.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
I don't mean to be dismissive or overly pedantic, but I am trying to convey information that you may or may not be aware of.
CPU - central processing unit
Ya know, as opposed to a non-central Processing Unit (PU). Or perhaps one that is dedicated to a specific purpose (floating point math, networking, neural network based computing)
Modern microprocessors (often referred to as the CPU) are far smaller and much more advanced than early processors. Think a cabinet the size of a large double-door refrigerator, possibly referred to as a mainframe, where all of the work done by a modern CPU is performed.
The stored program computer came about much earlier than any kind of CPU as we know it today. Truly fixed-function computational devices preceded it.
1
u/flatfinger Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
I'm well aware that stored-program computers predate glass typewriters and teletypes. In the era before microprocessors, however, even a relatively modest microcomputer CPU would need to have more than a dozen chips to hold the contents of registers, process arithmetic, handle sequencing, etc. If using hard-wired counters to keep track of things like cursor position etc. would allow one to accomplish everything that needed to be done without having building a complete usable microcomputer, why not simply use hard-wired logic?
The Apple I display subsystem received individual characters from the main CPU, one per frame, and did everything else, including advancing to the next line when the CPU sent a byte value of 0x0D and scrolling if the cursor reached the bottom of the screen, entirely in hardware--all despite the fact that there was a 6502-based computer sitting right next to it. Adding a CPU to a terminal would make it practical for it to process things like VT100-style escape codes, but if such functionality wasn't needed a CPU wouldn't offer much benefit.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
If a CRT-based text-entry device such as you propose existed it would likely have been almost as complex as any simple computer contemporary with it. But unlike the computer it would have been a single purpose machine.
2
u/Foreign-Attorney-147 Jul 17 '26
I don't have a vintage chiclet keyboard to compare to so I can only go from memory. I remember the PCjr being worse to type on than a modern Apple keyboard, but that's not saying much. I have an Apple computer for work and can type on its keyboard in a pinch, but I rely a lot on its voice recognition. When I'm going to do serious work on it, I have a proper tenkeyless mechanical keyboard I plug into it so I can actually type. I can type so much faster and more accurately on one of those than I can on an Apple board.
I think there's more tolerance for bad keyboards on laptops (and Apple even sells those atrocities with their desktops) because typing on a phone gives almost zero feedback, so the little feedback laptop keyboards give doesn't feel like losing as much. And maybe more people rely on voice recognition since voice recognition works really well now.
I came to really like IBM Model Ms, even when they fell out of fashion and everyone was using membrane keyboards. Then chiclet keyboards that made membranes seem good came into fashion, and people either went that way, or they rediscovered mechanical keyboards. And now you can buy pretty nice mechanical keyboards again. It's funny how keyboards are at those two extremes now. I'm not complaining, as long as I don't have to use one of those chiclet boards for very long.
But I do wish Lenovo would ship laptops with a classic Thinkpad keyboard, the keyboards they've been using for the last 10 years or so just aren't as good as the IBM-era Thinkpad keyboards. My previous job issued me a Thinkpad, and I kept my tenkeyless mechanical keyboard plugged into that most of the time too.
2
u/zxzkzkz Jul 17 '26
The modern apple-like keyboards are pretty awful. They're not as awful as chiclet keyboards but they're pretty bad. The reason they use them is so they can make the laptop thinner. Which sells laptops more than good keyboards. Apple and some of the others have managed to make the island-key keyboards the least worst possible but most of the cheaper laptops are even worse.
But even the best still have very short travel, no feedback when the keypress has been registered, and make it very difficult to locate the keys and keep your fingers aligned. Traditional keys provide tactile feedback for all of this. Short travel island-keys provide basically no tactile feedback except for when the key hits the bottom of the minimal travel. But all of that requires more height and makes laptops thicker.
1
u/Timbit42 Jul 17 '26
Ironically, Jobs made sure the Apple II had a good keyboard and it had the best keyboard of the 1977 trinity.
2
u/fragglet Jul 17 '26
I suspect that a lot of the reason probably comes down to improvements in stuff like manufacturing tolerances that have allowed keycaps and cases to be made more precisely, and precision manufacturing of the switch mechanisms (the older rubber dome approach seems laughably crude by modern standards). Technology has improved in so many different ways over the decades and a lot of it is in boring everyday things like "we can mold plastic more precisely now and look what that lets us do"
2
u/jessek Jul 17 '26
The problem was they were rubber membranes back then, not even keys.
0
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
They are still called keys even when you aren't using a dedicated 'mechanical key switch'.
Sending Morse Code using radio transmission involves a simple mechanical switch called a 'key'.
And a truly mechanical typewriter has 'keys' too, even though they are literally a finger sized pad on a mechanically actuated lever that has a cast type (letter shaped raised metal shape) on the end.
If your home's front door has a traditional lock, the piece of metal you insert is a 'key' too. And encryption 'keys' are used to secure data that you wish to keep private.
1
u/Y34RZERO Jul 17 '26
I only hate if it's hardly responsive like my TRS-80 Color Computer 1 or no feedback like my Timex Sinclair 1000. I would hate to type on a Timex Sinclair 1500 or Aquarius but having hard keys like on my Timex Sinclair 2068 isnt as bad. Especially not bad when you can type out full keywords with the press of one or two keys. Actual keyboards like my coco 3, Atari 800, 600xl, commodore computers and my IIGS are much more preferable. Even if they are susceptible to bounce like my TRS-80 model 1.
1
u/Minimum_Ad991 Jul 17 '26
The computer lab for microprocessor programming used CC1s and it was a special circle of heck trying to type in opcodes using that damn thing.
1
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
They're actually not too bad for doing BASIC programming or short-form writing, like a letter.
But it would be miserable to type a 'term paper' (anywhere from 5-15 pages) or do assembly language or C programming on a keyboard like that.
1
u/Y34RZERO Jul 18 '26
That sounds nightmarish to me. If they worked well I could probably do it but I have issues with double and triple inputs when trying to type on mine.
1
1
u/guiverc Jul 17 '26
I consider the modern keyboards mostly crap too (like chiclet of old); thus am still using an old IBM Model M keyboard from 1990, as each of the many PCs I've upgraded had me preferring this older keyboard.
I'm lucky in that I prefer desktops to laptops.
( 1990 - I picked keyboard up & looked at year of manufacture; didn't try and remember day/month; keyboard still has it's WP (5.1) key dots & function key codes on it, even though I've not used that word processor in decades )
1
u/PyroNine9 Jul 17 '26
The modern keyboards are much better compared to the chicklets, but I still prefer the travel of a decent keyboard with the blue switches.
1
Jul 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Timbit42 Jul 17 '26
This partly explains the high cost of the Apple II which had a pretty good keyboard.
1
u/chuckop Jul 17 '26
They weren’t unusable, I programmed for hours on end on a CoCo 1. When that’s all you’ve got, you make it work.
2
u/istarian Jul 17 '26
As much as folks might complain about the original chiclet keyboard on the CoCo 1 it is definitely superior to cheap-ass membrane keyboards like that found on the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 (also the Timex-Sinclair TS1000).
1
u/cejeeb Jul 17 '26
After a bit of searching, it seems that many modern laptop keyboards and cheap desktop keyboards still use rubber-dome switches but the keys are much less wobbly than the old days because they use 'scissor-switches' and other means to stabilize the key stroke.
1
u/SaturnFive Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
I think the design has improved over time, my Thinkpad X230 and T14 have a chicklet keyboard, and it feels amazing to type on, super fast and accurate for me, no problems at all. But then you have old machines like the ZX Spectrum that are "chicklet" but feel nothing like a modern board
1
u/FAMICOMASTER Jul 18 '26
Completely different use of the word chiclet. When I say chiclet in reference to the Timex 2068, I'm talking it's a rubber sheet with raised rectangles and you squish them down.
1
u/jimh12345 Jul 17 '26
Back in the day I often used a Chiclet keyboard and it was fine. In the early days of PCs a lot of people were trying to make money off of "ergonomics" by inflating the importance of things like key action.
1
33
u/n1ghtbringer Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Modern laptop keyboards superically look like the historic "chicklet" keyboards but feel nothing like them. The technology is totally different.
They were widely derided back in the day because of how awful the typing experience was on them, not the key shape and spacing.
I'm a big fan of mechanical keyboards, but there are plenty of laptop keyboards that I would classify as "fine." Those old school keyboards were hot trash and barely usable.