What purpose did the lower-right Enter key serve on original Mac 128k keyboard?

Most chat apps that send on enter (ex: Slack, Discord, Element) will accept Shift+Enter to move to the next line.

Yeah, this brought me back to the days of AIM and constantly having a "3" at the end of my messages (and people asking why) because I was pressing the Enter key on the numpad to send my messages (and sometimes accidentally hitting the 3), rather than the Return key which would add a newline into my message! The distinction was actually a good thing, looking back. Can't even guess how many messages I've erroneously sent in recent years when actually trying to jump to a new line in the text I'm drafting...

Yup I miss it to. I remember when Tweetie came along on the Mac and switched the convention. I tried to have the author fix it to no avail.

It's really bad in the default ChatGPT 4o app: I keep posting by mistake my "question" although it's not done yet, so I get non-sensical and slow babbling which I have to interrupt.

Yeah, wish I could still assign it to different hardware keys instead of it being relegated to an implementation detail that differs depending on what application I happen to be using or even which field I have highlighted in a particular application. It's maddening.

He was right to do so. Give people an easy way out of designing for a new interface and they won't design for it. It's the same reason why they didn't do a stylus for iPhones and iPads early on. If they had, the overwhelming "touch" design language would have favored small stylus size targets instead of large finger sized ones. Similarly, when they shipped USB on the iMacs, that was the only peripheral port for the first 2 versions. And when they finally added more than USB, it was to add the new Firewire, not to add any legacy ports back.

Would the Wii have done as well with motion controlled games if defaulting to a playstation style controller was doable out of the box? How many pieces of old software and technology stay around despite better modern replacements because defaulting to the familiar original is easier?

Not everything new is obviously better, and new doesn't mean it should necessarily replace what came before. But new needs dedication to giving it a fair shake, and sometimes that requires going all in on the new and making going back to the old difficult.

And in response, a market for numeric keypads with arrow keys was born.

You can focus on the one thing that aggravates you, or your can focus on everything that he got done during the arc of his career. Like it or not, he helped define today's world of computing.

Impossible to not read this in Norm’s nasal Canadian drawl.

One also wonders WTF Apple has against Delete keys. It's infuriating. Mac laptops and small Apple keyboards have only a Backspace key mislabeled "delete," and no real Delete key.

And, despite years of complaints, Apple pettily refused to address this even when physical media became obsolete and freed up the Eject key. They made this into... a baffling "lock" key or something if I remember correctly.

And even worse... when Eject existed, Apple put a HARDWARE delay on it; so you couldn't even remap it to be Delete. Why impose an insurmountable delay on an Eject key? Were people being killed by accidentally-ejected CDs? And if so, why didn't Apple simply make Eject a Delete key, with Eject being a secondary function accessible only with a modifier key... solving two problems at once?

Yeah. And if Apple design was so great, then why didn't we have separate copy+cut+paste keys, and undo+redo keys from the start? For example. Or even a help key.

Bonus points for those that use alt or ctrl just to add to the confusion.

That never occurred to me, but sounds wonderful! I wonder if modern interfaces would have ended up more navigable if there had been the expectation of these dedicated keys on every keyboard?

Return, short for Carriage Return, makes no contextual sense unless you're old (really old) enough to have seriously used typewriters.

Nowadays, I get "WTF" faces whenever I go down to the office supply store and ask them where they have their typewriter ribbon cartridges.

It's like Floppy Disk for the Save button, except Return didn't have the cultural weight behind it.

Also bad are the applications that don't understand that [DELETE] and [CLEAR] are not the same thing.

Many spreadsheets treated [RETURN] and [ENTER] differently.

I had one spreadsheet program that would move the cursor down one row on [RETURN], while [ENTER] performed the calculation (and recalculated any associated cells).

Another spreadsheet program used [RETURN] for a newline, and [ENTER] would recalculate the entire spreadsheet.

CR for "new line" was probably a holdover from Apple II. It was common on 8-bit computers also from Commodore, Acorn, Sinclair and Tandy.

Assuming both devices index the palette identically then accidentally pressing the button on the keyboard once should only require a single click on the mouse to make them match again.