20 Oct
2010
20 Oct
'10
3:56 p.m.
When people are geeky enough to be interested in my
collection of
serial terminals, this is one of the things I point out. I give them
a tour of the different keyboards. Most people don't realize that
I have an old (obviously) video terminal here which, while it can display
lower case, the origianl keyboard circuit could only send upper case.
Alas (for historical interest), I made one of the modifications shown in
the manual (a couple of TTL chips wired togther and soldered to points on
the keybaord PCB) which enables it ot send lower case too.
there was a time when lower case was a luxury :-). I
show them
Tektronix 4010 keyboards where punctuation characters are available on
the shifted alphabetic keys.
You want to find one of the old 3-row keyboards on a 5-bit terminal,
like my Creed 7E. On those, the digits are the figs shift of the top row
of alphabetical keys (so Q->1, W->2, etc0. And Punctuation marks are
scattered on the the other letters.
-tony