lk401 keyboard protocol?

From: der Mouse <mouse_at_Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
Date: Sun Feb 22 16:11:59 2004

>> As may be. Do [typewriters] not have keyboards?
> Well, OK, I would argue that the keyboard of a 19th century
> typewriter is still an ASCII entry device.

Even if it has buttons that produce characters not present in ASCII?
(I've personally seen at least one such.)

Michael, I greatly respect your technical competence. But you really
need to tone down the zealotry, especially where it runs counter to the
way the rest of the known world does things, or you will be -
deservedly - marginalized for it regardless of whatever else of value
you may have to offer.

Perhaps that prospect doesn't bother you. Perhaps being Pure matters
more than communication with other people. In that case, go right
ahead. But I, for one, will then soon be mechanically ignoring you.

> Any time you produce letter 'A', even if you handwrite it or type it
> on a 19th century typewriter, you are actually producing the
> fundamental symbol ("symbol" defined as "signal element" in
> communication theory) 1000001 in a roundabout way, whether you
> realise this or not.

Do you actually know anything of the history of alphabetic writing? Do
you know how utterly insane it is to try to consider ASCII primal, when
anything significantly similar to the English alphabet is a relatively
recent innovation?

This stance is not even logically defensible, because it leaves no
place for symbols that do not have ASCII codepoints, yet the only
difference between (say) a handwritten A and a handwritten symbol of
comparable complexity with no codepoint is that one has more widespread
cultural and linguistic recognition and utility than the other. It
also runs into problems where a single graphic symbol may correspond to
various codepoints. (I'm thinking in particular of the
line-and-two-arcs drawing typically read in English as a `B'. It could
be any of at least three and probably more semantically distinct
characters: think English, Russian, and Greek. For that matter, in the
right context it could even be the number thirteen.)

>> What _I_ dislike about the LK401 (and LK201, for that matter) is
>> that the <X] key and the right Shift key are single keys; I want
>> each of those to be split into two keys.
> Let me guess... You want it like the VT100 keyboard (and all truly
> Classic ASCII keyboards of the Golden Age) where in that area you had
> 4 separate keys generating ASCII BS, Delete, CR, and LF, right?

Well, exactly what the keys generate doesn't matter (and indeed the
LK201 doesn't generate ASCII either; that's a mapping performed by host
software). I just want software to be able to distinguish between what
on the LK401 are the left and right ends of those keys.

I don't remember the VT100 keyboard well enough to say how close this
is to that.

As I said, it's a matter of what I'm used to. The LK[24]01 isn't it.

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Received on Sun Feb 22 2004 - 16:11:59 GMT