What does the shading around some 48 series keys indicate?

[rprosperi]

(05-01-2020 06:57 PM)Jake Schwartz Wrote:  

(04-30-2020 11:10 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Seems to me that the internal fighting among the dev. team about the 48GX keyboard layout was not settled when the day came to freeze the layout for manufacturing....

Indeed, at the 1994 Dutch HP conference, HP's Diana Byrne (HP48G-series software team leader) talked about the internal "keyboard wars" before releasing the 48GX. I believe that Bill Wickes used the same term when presenting the 48SX, three years earlier.

Jake

I sat through (i.e. vigorously participated in) many myself when I was at Sharp around the same time. Until you've been scarred in these meetings yourself, you would never believe the wildly different ideas folks can have and the passion levels that are... exposed... while presenting them.

The key to good design decision-making is to always remain open to new and better ideas, no matter how long it took to win the last skirmish. Some of the Engineers and Product Planning team from Japan were the best I've ever met at remaining open to new, well thought-out arguments for improvements. Right up until the day before cut-off for manufacturing. Very few of the products like these ever had 'finished' keyboard layouts... but you gotta ship them, and can 'fix' the issues in the next version...