*TOP SECRET BONUS LEVEL*

You found it!

Minus world! The System/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 tonsils 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".

Who toggles the Num Lock key these days? EBM System/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 redundant as a cabbage at a teddy bear's picnic.

To the modern user, the "inverted T" arrangement of the now standard arrow keys feels as comfortable as a shawl on grandma — while remaining as efficient as a nun on the run.

The EBM System/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 ringfinger on 6 for RIGHT, while that multi-tasking middle digit dances on 8 for UP and 5 for DOWN.

Try it, you might like it. It's old-skool awesome, it oozes industrial cool – and you will find that it is surprisingly practical.

Index heads north for HOME and south for END. That real dead ringfinger for love races north for PGUP and south for PGDN. Thumb can hit INS, not that it wants to. And who knows, maybe pinky 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 pressing LEFT while depressing the DOWN key sent the cursor to column 0 of the next line.* Our engineers have implemented this same feature in the System/800's Editor Mode.

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

EASTER EGG — TOP SECRET, SHH!

Type BROCCOLI backwards during bootup, while eating Batchelors Cup-a-Soup on a Thursday in a thunderstorm, while rubbing your tummy backwards, and the System/800 will output EBM TOTALLY CONQUERS OUTER SPACE down the screen, locking your computer till you call the I.T. department. Try it!

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