I actively remember using almost all of those at one point or another. Many just for playing around on, or at friends houses (the Atari and the T/I's).<p>The PCjr is always bashed, especially for the keyboard, but I never understood that. For starters mine had the "real" keyboard in addition to the chiclet keyboard. I also knew a few other folks with jr's, and never remember anyone using the chiclet keyboard. I must've written a couple hundred thousand lines of BASIC on my jr, and interfaced it to all kinds of peripherals, and later other PCs in the house.<p>The PET brought back fond memories, I taught myself to program (more or less by looking at other BASIC programs for examples) on one of those. My first "application" was to display a calendar for the month of November... I finished it in February ;)
Is it sad or proud that I recognized 5 of the 10 keyboards from having written programs on them in elementary school? The TI-1000 was particularly atrocious, although the PCjr wireless keyboard was pretty godawful.<p>The old-school HP, IBM, and Sun workstation keyboards -- seemingly cleft from a solid block of metal, with a satisfying <i>CLICK</i> on each keypress -- get my vote as the best keyboards ever made. It was a sad day when I looked at the HP and IBM white-box models in a store one day and realized that the good keyboards were no longer being made.