The above overlay was made for Ethiopian Computers & Software of Colorado by Data Cal Corporation of Arizona, around 1988.

The overlays was made for the sake of Amharic typists who were used to the Amharic typewriter. The positions of the Ethiopic characters were close to those of the typewriter. However, the typewriter was made out of numerous pieces and there were about four pieces assignedl to a key . The characters on one typewriter key were not of the same order either as the assignment for the Ethiopic orders . I assigned he "Ethiopic "M" key to the "E" key only because at least some of the Amharic "M" characters were concocted from the "E" key  position.  The overlay was also used for the English-Ethiopian layout. This was done by sticking the overlay for say, Ethiopic "L" character on the "L" key instead of the "S" key. 

It should be noted that I used something close to the Amharic layout for the Ethiopic I computerized for the first time by assigning them to something close to the Amharic typewriter only because it was logical to use something that existed instead of starting with something new. The Amharic typewriter concept is a method whereby character parts were concocted from a single ASCII character set positions of a keyboard to create fake characters. My Ethiopic method involved about 480 real characters distributed on eight ASCII character sets.

The overlays were used on varieties of keys including the function keys and they supplemented the ModEth Manual. With the ModEth system the Ethiopic also inherited the English glyphs of the keyboard for the first time. The Ethiopic "Hi" in red and the curly bracket in green were assigned to the "F3" key to show that the third order Ethiopic glyphs and brackets were typed with the "F3" key.