TOP SECRET BONUS LEVEL

You found it!

Minus world! The S/800's lost levels! The warp zone! Glitch world! EBM's very own kill screen! The underground bit with blue fish!!!

No one ever got this far but you, so hold on to your souvenir Raccoon Suit - things are about to get weird.

NUMPAD NOT CONSIDERED HARMFUL

Many beard enthusiasts remember with odd affection the days of touring the urban backstreets of Lotus 1-2-3 - feeling the wind in their gelled hair as they utilized the numpad of a grubby 1984 IBM Model F.

Or better still, the 1981 model, with no nanny-state separation between the "typewriter keyboard" and the "cursor control block".

So who toggles the Num Lock key these days?

S/800 worksheet users, is who.

For the beardless masses, the issue is the odd choice of IBM - and many other keyboard designers - to position the down arrow on the 2 key, leaving 5 as empty as an empty picnic hamper.

To the modern user, the "inverted T" arrangement of the now standard arrow keys feels as comfortable as grandma's shawl - while remaining as efficient as an "ardent red" Lotus Elise.

The EBM S/800 resolves this by mapping both 5 and 2 to the down arrow when Num Lock is toggled off, so you can position your index finger on 4 for LEFT and your romantic ring finger on 6 for RIGHT, while that multi-tasking middle digit dances on 8 for UP and 5 for DOWN like Michael Jackson on convincing touch-sensitive paving stones in an iconic music video.

Try it, you might like it. It's old-skool awesome, it oozes industrial cool, yet it is also surprisingly practical.

Index heads north for HOME and south for END. That real dead ringer for love races north for PGUP and south for PGDN. Thumb can hit INS, not that it wants to. And who knows, maybe pinkie will develop an affection for MINUS, PLUS and ENTER?

All without breaking into a sweat.

KEYBOARD GONE ROGUE

In the heady days of 1981, The Wizard of Frobozz cast a spell on the EBM offices that rendered the instant soup machines useless, yet bewitched our keyboards such that tapping LEFT while depressing the DOWN key sent the cursor to column 0 of the next line.* One wonders how the world ever turned without this curious device. Our engineers have implemented this same feature in the S/800's Editor Mode.

Some keyboards, such as standard UK models, have a slash key between LEFT SHIFT and Z. In the S/800's Editor Mode, holding these keys mimics LEFT ARROW, while throwing CTRL into the mix mimics UP ARROW. Now you can scroll up and down through your document while, with the S/800 docked left or right, your right hand negotiates with the S/800 website.

FORCED CAPS MODE

Type F2+ALT in Editor Mode to toggle Forced Caps Mode. In this mode, all characters are displayed in caps. Temporarily disabled in Find Mode. This mode will be useful to 8-bit assembly language developers, who need to type in lowercase but may want to see the characters in CAPS like on many 8-bit machines.

* He also photographed his wizened backside on the office Xerox. But that, brave adventurer, is a tale for the company Christmas party.