Sirius 1 had the weird floppy drive and unusal high-res graphics. Apricot had Display-in-keyboard and compact form factors. Olivetti had charming italian design and the strange upside-down motherboard (when battery leaks it drips down instead of eating the PCB, talk about ahead of its time!)
All ran MS-DOS but not "PC compatible", so none of them really took off. Then everyone started to do 100% compatible clones, and it was a race to the bottom.
Maybe in the "who can make the cheapest clone" business. Because post-consolidation, plenty of outfits offered machines that set themselves apart. They had to.
As survivor of that era, Apple proved the point of higher margins, and the remaining OEMs want a piece of the pie, even better if it is ARM based instead of x86.
Microsoft wasn't the dominant player and was sort of the underdog in many ways. Lotus was usually considered a more important company (Lotus 123 was huge) and WordStar dominated word processing.
The idea of the office suite hadn't taken off.
There were multiple competing GUI shells (GEM was popular and considered better than Windows).
Other non-PC, non-Mac computers were legitimate choices. Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Amstrad all had non-PC lines that sold really well.
I did some work for Apricot at their Glenrothes factory around 1985-87. In my memory they went heavier on GEM than Windows. I never saw an Apricot running Windows prior to the PC-compatible models.
Nowadays one of my customers has a sodding great machine that boots DOS 6. To get data files to and from it I use Samba with all the safety catches switched off (on one side only) as a go between.
Those are price charts for pork belly futures.
Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because in the early 1980s it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics. So, getting Windows 2.x backported to the 2000 is definitely feasible.
I just checked the Tandy 2000 Windows pre-installation - it has the drivers unpacked, which means you can just get the Slow Boot Windows 2.0, and put the drivers from this floppy to it. And the fonts, of course. Definitely do not check this bad pirate website that has it: https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-2000-ms-windows-pre-Ins...
Mindset Mindset II.
Could the Mindset do 640x400 noninterlaced?
The Apricot F1 was another cool one, about the size of a shoebox with a trackball rather than a mouse - when no-one else had any kind of pointing device!
Keycaps tended to be molded with a hollow cylinder or stalk on their base, which fitted through a snug round aperture on the keyboard base and pressed against a spring or other restraint. Pressing the key down against the spring actuated a pcb-mounted push-switch (or bridged a pair of adjacent connectors on the pcb) that provided the keypress signal. Pressing a wide key off-centre would cause the plastic stalk to bind against the enclosing aperture. Forcing the user to press direcly above the stalk mitigates this - hence the raised part of the keycap.
There is a stack exchange question about this at [1].
As to why the shift keys were wider to begin with, I'm not sure. Perhaps a consequence of the lack of the mechanical constraints that forced typewriter keyboards into a strict grid due to the interleaving of the lever arms. Some keyboards, notably the Commodore PET, didn't use wide shift keys [2] though.
It is worth noting that keyboards in that era were machine-specific, and often hard-wired to the main system box. Afaik standardisation and interoperability didn't happen until RS232 and, later, ps2 keyboards were introduced.
[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/16471/why...
[2] and let me just say here that the PET keyboard was truly awful, even by 80s standards. Just shamefully terrible.
So, I think it is a mechanical/electrical limitation.
I think it's just what they did in the 80s.
Probably all gone in the skip now, the factory is sitting closed and empty.
This unlocked some memories.