Mineral oil

Today's tiny Tuesday blip are the cursor keys on a Commodore 64 (and also PET and VIC-20) keyboard. Before the relatively recent invention of the inverted "T", computers had all sorts of different cursor keys (or none at all). Commodore used an Up/Down key and a Left/Right key next to the right shift key. If you pressed the Up/Down key on it's own the cursor went down, and if you pressed Shift and Up/Down then it went up. The Left/Right key worked in the same manner. Most people hated it, but once you got used to it, the three keys were next to each other so it was in fact very simple to use and the best option until the invention of the modern inverted "T".

Most people will wonder what two plastic keycaps have to do with minerals - excluding the dust which will contain minerals - as they are made of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, the same plastic used to make Lego bricks. Well it's made from a mineral oil. which would have been dug up out of the ground. The PETRa at the start of petroleum means rock, which is a bit stretching mineral but it's all I've got - so I'm sticking with it!