Best keyboards you've used ever!

Mark Wickens <m.wickens(a)rhodium-consulting.com> wrote: 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, '@' 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