Talk:British and American keyboards

Talk
What about £ sign? That is not a documented change at all on this page. It is clearly shown in the pitures but no one seems to mention that the US keyboard has no £ while the UK does?

It is quite important over this side of the pond to be able to write in our own currency...

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.153.117.8 (talk) 17:27, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

This page seems to be very poorly written - it is rather difficult to follow what is being said. Besides this, it barely touches on the actual differences between the two types of keyboards. By far the worst is the swapping of " and @, particularly when a computer in Britain defaults to US keyboard, as one may be inputting scripts which require the " character, but through practice input @ instead!

Think I've taken care of all that, if briefly.

Why does the opening text state that accented vowels are needed in the UK? We type in the same language as you Americans.--193.195.185.254 02:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Probably a reference to the fact that a British buisiness person is more likely going to need to type in other languages in order to communicate with companies on the continent, being that Britian has more economic dealings with Europe. Though that may be less true in this globalized day and age.--oknazevad 22:08, 20 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Irish gaelic uses accentuated characters.

The following comment from the page seems rather odd: "For its UK layout, Microsoft accordingly adds an AltGr key, maps the £ to where the US layout has a #, and adds a 102nd key to accommodate the #. A few other variations (the reversals of @ and ', and the movement of ~ to the # key to accommodate a ¬ on the backquote key) have also crept in between the two."

This seems to suggest Microsoft designed the respective PC keyboard layouts in the UK and USA, whilst I believe this was actually decided by IBM (based on typewriter layouts, I'd imagine), back in the 1980s; apart from the Windows and application keys, which Microsoft convinced most PC vendors to add for Windows 95. Microsoft do, of course, create the keyboard layouts used by Windows, but for the most part, these simply reflect the physical layouts used by the PC manufacturers, and not the other way round.


 * Yes. The article also says that different operating system vendors provide different solutions, and yet it goes on to say that both PC and Mac keyboard layouts in the UK put £ above the 3 - so not so different after all?  The placement of the £ above the 3 was already normal in the days of 83-key keyboards, anyway.  But as to whether the PC keyboard layout is based on typewriter layouts, it's interesting to note that a lot of US typewriters seem to have " above the 2 (as modern UK PC keyboards do, but US ones don't).  The article Typewriter keyboard sadly provides pretty much zero info about the precise layouts present on typewriters or about how they differ from modern computer keyboard layouts, so if anyone knows about that stuff it would be great to add it. 09:46, 15 September 2007 (UTC)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.136.182 (talk)


 * Both apple and IBM (pretty sure it was IBM and not MS who came up with the keyboard layouts) did indeed put the pound sign in place of the hash sign but there are many differences between the two layouts. In particular the apple UK layout is much close to the apple US layout than the PC UK layout is to the PC US layout. Plugwash (talk) 12:58, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

What about Unix?
I'm not sure organizing this article by operating system makes sense, but no matter how it ends up, unix systems such as Sun hardware and PCs running Linux or BSD should be explained. Do they follow Windows or Mac more closely for instance? (And yes, I know Mac is now Unix-based, but the end result for the way the keyboard works is heavily influenced by the legacy of the earlier proprietary Mac system, so I think Mac will always deserve its own mention). 216.94.11.2 (talk) 20:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Keyboard layouts cross the divide between hardware and software. The physical layout of the keys, the scancodes they generate and what is printed on them is obviously a hardware issue but how exactly those scancodes are translated to characters is a software issue.
 * PCs running linux use standard PC keyboard layouts by default (though IIRC there is an option to select apple layouts and various other layouts). I'm not sure what the propietry unix systems do because i've never dealt with them. Plugwash (talk) 12:54, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Keyboards came before computers.
This piece seems to be written as a arbitrary list of what's available at a specific point in time (early 2000's). Typewriter keyboards in the two countries were established and standardised well before somewhat arbitrary Microsoft layouts. References to these, ideally with layouts is needed here I feel.

As an aside - the inability to map your own user preferences in the MS operating system keyboard (such as a UK user living in Germany might map alt-a to a-umlaut) severely limits friendliness/functionality compared to some other operating systems (Linux).Djp (talk) 12:24, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Why?
Some of the differences are fairly self-explanatory, such as adding the £ sign, but can anyone add info on the reasons behind other changes, such as swapping " and @? Nick Fel (talk) 10:33, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Having the " on 2, as in the UK version, is actually the more traditional typewriter position in all English-speaking countries (not that there were official standards for typewriters before the late-twentieth century). The change in America was brought about by the IBM Selectric typewriter in the Sixties. This isn't a fully satisfactory explanation because the Selectric had @ on 2, ^ on 6 and * on 8 compared to traditional typewriters generally having " on 2, _ on 6 and ' on 8. My best guess would be that because ' is easier to type if it's on the home row (and you type it more often than *), and that, when ISO-646 symbols were put on typewriter-style keyboards (rather than teleprinter-style keyboards), the ^ had to go on the main section of the keys anyway (rather than being an optional key), it made sense for manufacturers to slowly adopt most of the IBM Selectric changes in the British Isles, with the BSI standards catching up, but @ remains in it's traditional position. 94.194.152.34 (talk) 21:04, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

Also, if anyone knows what ¬ actually is? --Arkelweis (talk) 20:15, 7 February 2011 (UTC)


 * See Negation. Not a commonly-used symbol admittedly. Letdorf (talk) 00:13, 10 February 2011 (UTC).

US international
The section on the US international layout mentions that certain keys become dead keys. Is there any way to type the characters that these keys were originally used for when using a US international layout? 80.0.68.41 (talk) 12:30, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, use the space bar after the desired character. 82.170.250.105 (talk) 12:33, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Very oddly structured article
More work needed! (than I am willing to do, lacking any subject knowledge). --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:27, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
 * 1) The article begins with "the UK layout ... differs from the US layout in the following ways". Eh? The US keyboard has not been described yet, so how does it make any sense to dive straight into differences from it?
 * 2) The article fails to explain the difference between physical keyboard with engraved keytops (on the one hand) and software keyboard mapping (on the other).
 * 3) It needs to be mentioned that the so-called "UK" keyboard mapping (Windows, ChromeOS) is actually an English/Irish keyboard: it is not possible to get Welsh and Scots Gaelic diacritics without installing UK-Extended.