Best keyboards you've used ever!

From: Michael Sokolov <msokolov_at_ivan.Harhan.ORG>
Date: Thu Aug 26 13:13:28 2004

Mark Wickens <m.wickens_at_rhodium-consulting.com> wrote:

> List the best keyboards you have ever used.

Right now the keyboard I insist on using is LK201, but that's only
because I'm a nut about DEC VTxxx terminals and don't want to use a
keyboard whose set of function keys does not directly correspond to
the set of VTxxx transmitted escape sequences. I like LK201 better
than LK401 because I have no use for the latter's "Alt function"
keys, because I don't like how they shrunk from 4 to 2 LEDs, and
because LK201 is more sturdy while LK401 is more flimsy.

The really interesting keyboard I've used (for Western readers) is
the Soviet KOI keyboard. Unfortunately I never got to use the
"real deal" (Soviet serial terminals), but I've used the KOI kbd on
the BK0010, the Soviet home computer based on the 1801VM1
microprocessor, a Soviet PDP-11 clone, a single chip microprocessor
roughly equivalent to an LSI-11. It was a home computer for which
you were expected to write all software yourself from the ground up,
by entering octal codes at octal addresses (assuming you wanted
something other than BASIC or FOCAL that they had in ROM). I really
miss that mentality (I still believe every hacker needs to write his
own operating system as a rite of passage).

Soviet KOI keyboards are really interesting. They are based on
KOI, which is the Soviet reinterpretation of ASCII. In Latin mode
KOI is identical to ASCII, but thought of differently, in that
all characters from 100 octal up are considered Latin letters, so
in the mind of a Soviet hacker, '_at_' is the 0th letter of the Latin
alphabet, '[' is the next Latin letter after Z, and the last Latin
letter is '_'. In Russian mode characters from 100 octal up are
given alternative graphic renditions (Russian letters, not surprisingly).
Note that it's the *graphic rendition* of the character that changes,
not the character itself; the coded form is the primal form: a
compiler will recognise a keyword equally well regardless of whether
the tty displays it with the Latin rendition or the Russian rendition.

The KOI keyboard was designed around this mentality, i.e., the
upper/lower case switch acted on all keys that we considered letters.
'{' is the lowercase '['. The layout was different. When we got the
first PeeCees I at first couldn't stand their kbd because of the top
row layout: how ridiculous it is that '^' (a letter) is on top of '6'
(a digit). That drove me nuts. The KOI keyboards were much more
rational in that the key layout directly corresponded to the ASCII/KOI
chart. The top row keys were in their ASCII/KOI order. The encoding
logic was a breeze since with this layout all modifier keys (Ctrl,
Shift, upper/lower case switch and the RUS/LAT switch) only had to
twiddle bits.

MS
Received on Thu Aug 26 2004 - 13:13:28 BST