Following on from the previous post about Cyrillic vs Latin, you might want to check out this fascinating article by Art Lebedev, tracing the history of the cyrillic typewriter.  I particularly like this gem of a paragraph about the development of the modern cyrillic keyboard:

But in the late 1980s foreign personal computers arrived in the USSR. Producing keyboards with account for the length of the Russian alphabet was and is uncommon. Therefore, some imbecile was told (or did he volunteer?—whatever) to Russianize a keyboard that was available. And this imbecile, apparently a programmer, did not do just a silly thing, but perpetrated a crime by putting comma in the upper case, his reasoning being the Russian alphabet is long, while the number of keys on the keyboard is only enough for the Latin alphabet.

[Hat tip: Blogchik]

I’ve only ever used this style of keyboard, and I find it incredibly difficult to type in Russian, so maybe I should be cursing this imbecilic engineer too.  But I shall refrain from doing so because I’m sure I’d be just as bad on any other design of cyrillic keyboard…

Maybe a keyboard like this (designed, incidentally, by Art Lebedev) would help…

Each key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at any particular moment. When you hit CapsLock, the display will show all uppercase letters, and you can easily toggle between languages and keyboard layouts. Add to that the capability of associating keys with certain controls for Photoshop or video games, and you’ve got one mighty powerful keyboard.