Note: I know this page is a few years out of date (since 2001). It should be updated shortly, to reflect the current state of things. -April, 2005
I am told that there were typewriters, standard and electric, which had Maltese letters on them. I have not seen these, nor been able to contact anyone who knows what they look like or how the keys are arranged. If you have any information, please let me know!
Let us clarify some terms. Keyboard refers to the physical device containing keys which one can press. However, when we talk about a Maltese keyboard, we are not referring to the manufacture of an object made of plastic so much as the layout of the keys in order to type in Maltese.
Why is there a need to standardize the keyboard for Maltese? If one is only an occasional user of Maltese, it is in my opinion not very important what method is used for typing. Why? The occasional user does not learn nor have a need to learn to use the keyboard efficiently. For this reason, efforts on the keyboard must concentrate on the needs of heavy users of Maltese. Of course, it must not be made unapproachable to others, or nobody will try it.
English being legally and practically the other official language of the Republic, it goes almost without saying that a layout which includes Maltese with the exclusion of English is not practical. Even if there was a person who types strictly in Maltese, and avoids all unassimilated loan words, they would still require the undotted 'c' to type surnames such as Caruana and Fenech. Many systems do allow you to switch layouts in midsentence. However, we would not want to require this for typing English letters, for speed and for ease of learning. As a result, it is my opinion that all English letters, numbers, and the most used punctuation should remain in their places.
Regarding "their current places", this brings me to another topic. It must be noted, and noted well, that the placement of keys on English-language is far from consistent, even when the UK-US distinction is removed. For example, among US layouts the \ (backslash or reverse solidus) and Enter or Return key at least change positions. But the distinction between US and UK is rather glaring. I spent a large part of a day, recently, trying to track down a user problem that ended up being the fault of a US or UK keyboard, which was selected wrongly by the operating system.
But the largest difference which is relevant here is that the US keyboard does not have a key to the left of the 'Z' key (other than shift), whereas the UK keyboard has backslash (\) there. The current Malta Standardisation Authority draft MSA/DMS/100 for the keyboard layout has Z bit-tikka located on this backslash key. It is the concern of this author that if such a system is adopted, it will cause difficulty for people who must use both types of keyboards, because they cannot comfortably learn a position to type with.