As a kid, I wondered why the keys were in such a weird order, and also why keyboards would have $ on them but no ¢. It took me a while to be able to consistently locate some of the rarer letters when typing.

We also had a C64 and a Tandy 1000, neither of which used standard IBM keyboard layouts. Here is a link to the C64 keyboard with its oddities like "RESTORE" and "CLR HOME".

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TKB Super Mario Bros.

Back when I was in Germany and taking German classes, I had a custom English/German layout. I didn't want the full German layout because then I'd have to deal with Z and Y being swapped and () shifted 1 key to the left, among other things, so I just added an umlaut dead key and ß to Alt Graph (I already had €). Now I use US International.

The C64 layout had Ctrl where Tab normally is (there was no Tab key at all) and a Commodore-logo key which acted like Alt Graph, giving you a set of graphics characters, mostly lines and such. Most keys were 2-function, like up is Shift and down, Insert is Shift-Delete, etc. I guess they wanted to save money using fewer keys or something. Also, even American C64s had a £ key (the US and UK C64s had identical keyboards), @ and * were unshifted, and instead of ^ there was an up-arrow symbol which was also unshifted.

As for the Tandy, the main keyboard had a few keys too few, so stuff like \ was actually out on the numeric keypad. The Tandy 1000 may also have pioneered the inverted-T arrow keys and 12 function keys in 3 groups of 4 at the top. Contemporary IBM keyboards shared the arrows on the keypad as the only set of arrows and only had 10 function keys in 2 columns at the left. Tandy also put the Alt key in an odd spot (right of Backspace, IIRC) and it was a small key. I had no idea that it was supposed to be a modifier key like Shift and Control.

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TKB Super Mario Bros.