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Page one describes the keyboard being completely reprogrammable: The keyboard has unlimited rollover, meaning that a keystroke is sensed when the key is depres
by delish 11y ago
Page one describes the keyboard being completely reprogrammable:
The keyboard has unlimited rollover, meaning that a keystroke is sensed when the key is depressed, no matter what other keys are depressed at the time.
Actually, the hardware can tell exactly what physical keys are being pressed at any given moment: it knows when any key is depressed and when it is released. This means that the Lisp Machine could* be programmed to interpret the keyboard in any manner whatsoever: in this sense the keyboard is completely "soft".*
It's refreshing reading an instruction manual for a computer that states the reprogrammability of its keyboard. This is "what you get when you make the hardware and software" taken further than Apple.
The manual then says the number of deviants from their defaults will be small:
But the Lisp Machine has already been programmed to interpret the keyboard input in a useful way, and such reprogramming would be necessary only for the most special needs.
Symbolics, I disagree. I (a regular programmer) have reprogrammed my computer's keyboard to imitate parts of "programmer's dvorak." Because my system is not as reprogrammable as a lisp machine, I must be aware of how my BIOS, kernel, X11, and emacs are each interpreting my keyboard input. It was a pain that would have been less on a lisp machine.
There are a lot of holes in my argument, though. My need for reprogrammability was created by ThinkPad's, Linux', and emacs' design choices I disagree with.
- treve 11y ago> Symbolics, I disagree. I (a regular programmer) have reprogrammed my computer's keyboard to imitate parts of "programmer's dvorak. I think that qualifies as 'most special'.
- ScottBurson 11y agoI reprogrammed the alphabetic layout on my Symbolics machine. It was easy. (I use a custom layout I created myself, very similar to the Asset layout [0].) Fortunately, there was no need to remap the Caps Lock key, which I am guessing is the one that gave you the most trouble on the ThinkPad. It would have been hopeless on the Symbolics; the key has a physical alternate-action mechanism, like a ballpoint pen's. Here's a photo [1] taken with the key in the down position. You can also see it's well out of the way; Rub Out (the key that deleted the previous character; now generally labeled Backspace on PCs, or Delete on Macs) is where God intended it, to the left of A. So you probably wouldn't have had any desire to remap Caps Lock. [0] http://millikeys.sourceforge.net/asset/ http://millikeys.sourceforge.net/asset/ [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Symbolics-keyboard.jpg/1920px-Symbolics-keyboard.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Sy...
- DonHopkins 11y agoAt least it's still useful as CTRL-LOCK for Emacs. I remember you had an awesome custom MINCE keyboard. Any old photos of that?
- ScottBurson 11y agoNo, and I scrapped that machine c. 1989. Wish I hadn't.
- DonHopkins 11y agoI admired your keyboard because at the time, I had a custom keyboard on my own Apple ][, which mapped the left and right "meta" keys to the game paddle buttons. I wrote a terminal emulator for it in FORTH that supported RMS and Devon's SUPDUP line saving protocol (%TDSAV and %TDRES) which ITS EMACS could use to stash lines away in a buffer before scrolling them off or writing over them, and then restore them instantly when you scroll back! It was really great for EMACSing at 1200 baud! http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/supdup.f http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/supdup.f
- eschaton 11y agoMapping the paddle buttons to meta keys was such a good idea that Apple used it on the Apple //e with the open-Apple and closed-Apple (eventually option) keys. Was that a common thing for extended keyboards in the Apple ][ era?
- DonHopkins 11y agoIt was standard practice to wire the shift key to paddle button zero to get upper/lower case when you had an 80-column card. But I used full ASCII keyboard that supported upper and lower case, and had two extra buttons that were easy to wire up to paddle buttons and use as modifiers. "For lowercase input, since it was not possible to detect whether the keyboard's Shift keys were in use, a modification called the "one-wire shift key mod" connected the Shift key to one of the pins on the motherboard's paddle connector. Compatible applications, including nearly all word processors, could then detect whether the shift key was being pressed. This modification, however, involved adding wires inside the Apple II, and was therefore only popular among hobbyists. For this reason, most applications that could support lower-case letters could also use the ESC key as a substitute lowercase toggle if the "shift key mod" was not installed." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_Plus#Substitute_lowercase_functionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_Plus#Substitute_lower...