Am 02.08.2015 um 14:30 schrieb Stephen:

> When I used to work for a living. It was fun working on a machine that
> had lost its CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
> The keyboard would revert to US settings but the letters didn't. ;-)
> Remembering where the  backslash, at sign and inverted comma keys were,
> was a pain.

Tell me about it. The German keyboard layout shares exactly five(!) 
punctuation character locations with the US one, AND has two letter keys 
swapped.

I never bothered to try and remember the US locatin of characters. All I 
cared about was that typing "kezb gr" (sic!) would usually fix the mess.


And then there was the keyboard of my first own PC. One of the things I 
did pretty early after unboxing was to install some Norton Commander 
clone which, as you may recall, made heavy use of the function keys as 
hotkeys for important stuff; I knew most of them by heart.

So a moment later I was sitting in front of the thing with a puzzled 
expression on my face, struggling to find the F7 key.

"Okay, let's do this systematically," I thought, and went through the 
function key row: "Here's F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6, F5, F8... Wait, *WHAT?!*"


The good news was that yes, the second F5 key behaved exactly like the 
good old F7 key. Phew! :)

Also, the keyboard was a genuine Cherry keyboard (albeit branded 
differently by the OEM) with easily removable keycaps, so a letter to 
the OEM and a few days later I was able to swap the keycap for a 
properly labeled one.

I think I still have the F5 keycap somewhere.

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