That does not compute

Sam wrote: This wasn't so much a matter of how Woz wanted it, but how the standard keyboard encoder chips of the time (GI AY-5-2376, AY-5-3600) were programmed. 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 '@' (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. The square brackets and backslash are shift-K through shift-M for the same reason. By the time of the MOS keyboard encoder chips, the bit patterns could be set arbitrarily in the ROM, but the standard versions were deliberately programmed to match the Teletype. Had Apple wanted to spend the money, they certainly could have gotten a different keyboard layout, but in late '76 or early '77 they probably couldn't justify the expense. And back then people considered themselves lucky to get a keyboard at all. Eric