I believe you're right. From my limited memory of that period, it was a mechanical constraint.
Keycaps tended to be molded with a hollow cylinder or stalk on their base, which fitted through a snug round aperture on the keyboard base and pressed against a spring or other restraint. Pressing the key down against the spring actuated a pcb-mounted push-switch (or bridged a pair of adjacent connectors on the pcb) that provided the keypress signal. Pressing a wide key off-centre would cause the plastic stalk to bind against the enclosing aperture. Forcing the user to press direcly above the stalk mitigates this - hence the raised part of the keycap.
There is a stack exchange question about this at [1].
As to why the shift keys were wider to begin with, I'm not sure. Perhaps a consequence of the lack of the mechanical constraints that forced typewriter keyboards into a strict grid due to the interleaving of the lever arms. Some keyboards, notably the Commodore PET, didn't use wide shift keys [2] though.
It is worth noting that keyboards in that era were machine-specific, and often hard-wired to the main system box. Afaik standardisation and interoperability didn't happen until RS232 and, later, ps2 keyboards were introduced.
The keyboard on the Apricot uses round capacitive foam pads under the keys. This means the keys had to be square, or they needed a mechanical thing like the space button on the photo here: https://www.baffo71.com/details.php?id_img=7
So, I think it is a mechanical/electrical limitation.
I have no idea, but I do have a PC/AT keyboard with similarly-shaped keys. They have the usual "square horseshoe" / "anti-roll bar for Matchbox cars" arrangement underneath so they don't rock when you press the end.
He was paid by Google with money made through Google’s shady practices.
It’s like saying that it’s cool because you worked on some non-evil parts of a terrible company.
I don’t think it’s right to work for an unethical company and then complain about others being unethical. I mean, of course you can, but words are hollow.
Thank God for lucrative work higher up the stack. Maybe programmers will stop being the only scapegoats for rising home prices and the high cost of living.
I wonder if Visopsys, Windows 3.11 and others could work as a daily driver running in qemu, started from a Linux initrd that has just a browser and qemu. "Opening" the browser in Visopsys actually switches to the browser running on the host, and Alt-Tab switches back to Visopsys.
This can trace all processes on the host while strace traces one PID and its descendants. And bpf tracing does not stop processes at each syscall, so they run without slowdowns.
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