11 Jan
2007
11 Jan
'07
12:07 p.m.
In article <f4eb766f0701111141s457f5e78ma4de35d5faad9bb7 at mail.gmail.com>,
"Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes:
On 1/11/07, Adrian Graham <witchy at
binarydinosaurs.co.uk> wrote:
The Apricot Xi had a keyboard with a membrane keypad arranged as
something like 6 horizontal keys and a 2x40 LCD above the membrane
keypad. Each membrane key had an associated LED. The intention was
that you would write the labels into the LCD and illuminate the LED fo
the key to alert the user that the key was active. It was an
interesting idea, but only really useful for "hunt and peck" typers as
the membrane keys were too far away to be reached by touch typing.
The Apricot was an interesting machine -- MS-DOS compatible, but not
BIOS compatible. In the end, you needed BIOS compatability to be
"100% compatible" in the clone market and the Apricot failed. But
they were nice looking machines with a nice keyboard compared to the
boring boxes offered by others.
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On 11/1/07 18:50, "Ethan Dicks"
<ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
It's not so much _what_ it is as where it is. It reminds me of the
character legends above/below dials in a dial box.
I've thought about something like that with a more modern twist - I
have a few 40x2 LCDs - I got them from BG Micro, but I think they were
originally from a satellite TV box - one could mount some shaft
encoders above and below the LCD and have 8-10 chars per dial, or one
could mount it above the function keys and do something similar to
what this terminal is doing. The keyboard close-up was nice. Never seen a
legend bar above the
function keys like that... pretty slick.
It's just a serially driven LED cluster though isn't it? Doesn't stop it
being slick, mind :)