On 1 Jan 1999, Eric Smith wrote:
> It's called a 'bit-paired' keyboard layout, and you can blame it on the
> ASR-33 Teletype. It was much easier to build a mechanical keyboard encoder
> such that unshifted and shifted characters from the same key differed by only
> one bit. So 'P' (0x50) is a natural character to pair with '_at_' (0x40).
> Similarly, the double-quote character (0x22) is the shift of the digit
> '2' (0x32), and the single-quote (0x27) is the shift of the digit '7' (0x37),
> rather than having both quotes on the key to the right of the semicolon.
Cool! This is the sort of seemingly useless information that I really
like to learn about. I think its actually pretty important to know why
seemingly minor things like this are the way they are.
Thanks for the info. It makes perfect sense.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Thu Dec 31 1998 - 23:20:51 GMT