The keyboard's 'touch' is similar to most electric typewriters in that only brief,

light pressure is required to activate each key. The difference, of course, is that

the characters produced by each key depression are displayed on the screen,

rather than being printed on paper. Under normal circumstances, the response

is immediate, although there are occasions (when the computer is busy doing

something else) when there may be a momentary delay before the characters

appear.

The keyboard also incorporates a feature known as auto-repeat if a key is

pressed and held down, the corresponding character will be repeated, after a

short initial delay. Repetition continues until the key is released or until the

computer runs out of space to store the line being input (indicated by a

continuous tone from the speaker).

Throughout the remainder of this guide, we shall use

text Like this

to denote input from the keyboard and output on the screen whereas symbols

like

denote specific key depressions. The large Space Bar at the bottom of the

keyboard is denoted by . The simultaneous depression of two keys is

indicated like this:

The alpha-numeric keyboard

The alpha-numeric keyboard contains keys denoting all the letters of the

alphabet (including space), the numbers 0 to 9, various special symbols (such as

punctuation, £, % etc.) plus a number of other special-purpose keys. It also

contains, in the lower left-hand corner, a row of three indicators labelled power,

caps lock and shift lock.

The power indicator is illuminated while the computer is switched ON.

If caps lock is ON (i.e. illuminated), depression of any alphabetic key will

produce a capital (upper-case) letter; depression of any key containing two

symbols will produce the lower of the two characters.

If shift lock is ON, the alphabetic keys will still produce upper-case letters but

depression of any key containing two symbols will produce the upper of the two

characters.

If neither caps lock nor shift lock is ON, depression of the alphabetic keys will

produce small (lower-case) letters and the keys containing two symbols will

once again produce the lower of the two characters.

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