Interesting explanation, thanks! Yes, I have noticed the super awkward position of comma on the Russian keyboard. That must be irritating absolutely everyone. Can't imagine who agreed that it should be placed there.

I agree that the fact that English has so few letters and no accents or umlauts complicates! It's not quite as tricky in Swedish as in Russian, but we have 3 more letters than English, and need to use accents more. So ; : and - require pressing shift, and [ ] @ € require pressing ctrl+alt too! I think the situation is similar for German and French too.

Impressive that you used a Yamaha in the mid 1980s! Was it at home or for some other reason?
I noticed that for the Yamaha they put the English letters at the same place as the equivalent sound in English. I.e. a completely different position than QWERTY. This isn't still done, is it? When I first took up Russian, I read that there is actually an alternative Russian keyboard layout, which puts the Russian letters at positions that matches the English sounds, i.e. a kind of Russian QWERTY. But the book recommended against using this layout since it is unusual.

I remember using a model in school, during the mid 80s. Unbelievably (as it seems today) it was manufactured in Sweden by a state owned company. It had a wider keyboard with more keys to acommodate all keys in a comfortable position, as well as Swedish words on the keys for delete and print screen etc. The spec was probably super low, but it could be programmed in Pascal... Of course, local manufacturing of computers did not stand a chance against competition from globalisation, so it never took off but it made me interested in computers and learning more.