READER COMMENT

Keyboards for the clumsy

There is an ad on TV these days, showing a fellow waking up to a three-foot-tall alarm clock, dragging a five-foot-wide attache case and trying to talk into a six-foot-long telephone receiver. The ad is for a cold medicine, and at the end, the main character recommends the tablets to a secretary sitting behind an eight-foot-wide keyboard.

That ad came to mind when I read lan's Quest in the January '89 issue and noticed the line "12 cm wide by 14 cm high, with a 6-cm gap between keys (almost 7 cm on the AT)."

Those keys are about 5 inches by 6 inches with a two-inch gap. Does the author have the keyboard from the commercial, or should it have been mm (millimeters) rather than cm (centimeters)?

As I come from Europe, I could not help but submit this piece of "constructive criticism."

—Will Faber
Boca Raton, FL

Well, the secret's out. The truth is that Ian's hands became incredibly enlarged when he had a run-in with a steamroller. Rather than give up computing, he had special keyboards made that would allow him to type with his now foot-long digits. We do thank you, though, for mentioning that TV advertisement. One of Ian's keyboards came up missing a while back, and now we know where it went.