Your Name wrote on 14. January 2016:
>
> In article , Andreas Kohlbach
>  wrote:
>> Your Name wrote on 13. January 2016:
>> >
>> > Possibly - I really couldn't be bothered playing with the crappy things
>> > long enough to find out / remember. The commands were printed on the
>> > "keys" themselves though.
>>
>> Yep, I once saw it. I was amazed when I visited the UK in 1986 with other
>> students and saw the kids of the host family had one. Had no idea why
>> words are printed on the keys.
> 
>
> Yep. It wasn't possible to simply type "I" and "F" for the IF
> statement, you were *forced* to press Shift-Function-M (or whatever the
> key combination was). That silliness and the ridiculously bad
> "keyboards" (flat membrane keyboards on the ZX80 and ZX81, and small
> rubberised keys on the Spectrum) made trying to program the toys a task
> in futility and stupidity.

Although I would think that somebody who got used to this is then faster
writing code than with a "real keyboard".

The problem when the Sinclair series (the QL was already a bomb) died out
a few years later their users had no choice but to get a real keyboard on
a future computer, they would have to learn to for example type "load"
instead of just "j".
--
Andreas

I use a Unix based operating system, which means I get laid almost as often
as I have to reboot my computer.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05