Those keyboard (in the original form) used hall effect switches, which I believe are now very rare. They were chosen for high reliability. As far as layout is concerned, I believe the best feature was the location of the “rubout” key immediately to the left of the A key. I still wish I could find a keyboard with that location. How else can I correct my misakes rapidly enough… We understood even back then how completely useless caps lock was, compared to virtually anything else. The arrangement of modifier keys on the lower left and right for “chording” commands was important, and has also been lost. I’m also amazed that a set of extremely useful features such as the “run bars” which take just a single pixel high at the bottom of the screen, and let you see processor, disk, and network activity have never made it into the mainstream. Also, the mouse documentation line, telling you what will happen when you click the mouse.
On Mar 5, 2015, at 9:44 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
These were the "Knight"/Symbolics keyboards. The best, ever.
I was able to type at 120 wpm on these keyboards.
At 07:19 AM 3/5/2015, Joerg Arndt wrote:
Some people map caps-lock to ctrl (IIRC old HP(?) keyboards had the key labeled "ctrl" right there).
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