Site is gruelling slow, btw. Hope that's just today.

HI
Sorry, I don't now about rarity. but I have seen quite a few of these on sale when looking for items on my wish list - I'd estimate that I see them 1 in 250 TWs seen, and only ever on large desk machines: standard TWs.  I have only ever seen them on older machines, but that may be accident.

I've never really understood why they are necessary, except that they reduce the number of 0s you need to hit, but then accounting would, presumably, require relatively few instances of typing 1000 or 100 etc, so I'm unsure.  And I've never seen them in printed form -  could you type these keys out and show us please?

Thanks for the replies!

beak wrote:

I've never really understood why they are necessary, except that they reduce the number of 0s you need to hit, but then accounting would, presumably, require relatively few instances of typing 1000 or 100 etc, so I'm unsure. And I've never seen them in printed form -  could you type these keys out and show us please?

They don't actually produce numbers, they're just a way to get the carriage in the right position for typing those number ranges in the correct place. Think pre-defined tabs.
I never used them, but then again, I'm not in accounting No idea how useful this function was in those days.

Uwe wrote:

The rest of the keyboard is interesting too; I can't make it out from your photo, but what's on the key sharing space with the British Pound symbol?

The circle with 2 dashes? IIRC that was used in an oldfashioned way to abbreviate the word "Number", like "No", with the sign instead of the "o". Don't know if this was British or continental.

Valiant wrote:

Wow. You found that in the DUMP? You showed great foresight in your youth. 

Actually I found it in the trash that the neighbour office put outside, together with some more office supplies. They're kinda nuts - a couple of years ago, they dumped 4 printers (2 HP lasers and 2 inkjets, all fully functional), 2 CRT-monitors and some assorted computer stuff. Needless to say, I salvaged it all.

Hi 50

Here's an explanation of the 5th row of keys. When a ledger sheet was being filled for permanent records, it was often typed as opposed to being hand written. As you know, a ledger contains columns for numbers and always looks much neater if the decimal points line up all the way down the column. When the TW was being set up for a set of ledger sheets, a separate tab was set where the decimal point was to sit in each column .

Now imagine yourself copying a list of numbers ranging from 5¢ all the way up to $487,529.28. When typing .05 you'd tab to that column, then type .05. When typing the huge number, tabbing would take you to the decimal point, then you'd have to backspace 7 times before typing the number, tedious to say the least and very inefficient. Instead of having to backspace, hitting the 100 TH's key would stop the carriage 7 spaces to the left of the decimal point, from there you'd type in the number. Hope this helps.

Now onto Uwe's question

Here's a quick explanation of the key you have in question. If you notice, this keyboard does not have the # key, instead, number is abbreviated to upper case N followed by what looks like an underlined degree symbol º, something like №.

All the best,

Sky