> As I recall, the UK keyboard layout was designed to allow entry of every character in the ASCII and EBCDIC character-sets, which explains why it includes "¬" and both vertical bar ("|") and broken bar ("¦").
Seems kind of pointless. If you're going to include some extra keys, how about a few Greek letters, or accented English letters (without AltGr)? Of course, that's not to say there aren't pointless keys on the US English keyboard (what the hell is "`" for?).
> Putting double-quote above "2" makes perfect sense if you've ever looked at an ASCII table.
But there's no reason to base the keyboard layout on ASCII tables. The keyboard should be designed to be as intuitive as possible, rather than staying true to some obscure technical details.
Presumably they didn't include any Greek or other letters because they weren't in the basic ASCII or EBCDIC sets. I guess they wanted their keyboard to be standard across both kinds of computers: micros and mainframes.
Seems kind of pointless. If you're going to include some extra keys, how about a few Greek letters, or accented English letters (without AltGr)? Of course, that's not to say there aren't pointless keys on the US English keyboard (what the hell is "`" for?).
> Putting double-quote above "2" makes perfect sense if you've ever looked at an ASCII table.
But there's no reason to base the keyboard layout on ASCII tables. The keyboard should be designed to be as intuitive as possible, rather than staying true to some obscure technical details.