Digging a little bit deeper, it's just a bit of an oddball... the layout
appears to be a slight modification on the Russian Phonetic. This indicates
it was likely used outside the CIS by someone who may not have been a
native Russian speaker. Per Wikipedia:
"The Russian phonetic keyboard layout (also called homophonic or
transliterated) is widely used *outside* Russia, where normally there are
no Russian letters drawn on keyboard buttons. This layout is made for
typists who are more familiar with other layouts, like the common English
QWERTY keyboard, and follows the Greek and Armenian layouts in placing most
letters at the corresponding Latin letter locations. It is famous among
both native speakers and people who use, teach, or are learning Russian,
..."
Hope this is not too OT/TMI for my fellow list members; I was just a bit
intrigued by this one. I wonder what application it served during its
useful life.
Best,
Sean
On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> wrote:
Very unusual specimen, I was about to spout off and
say maybe it's from
some kind of industrial control application (I've seen old Sun machines
used as operator positions on various industrial control systems, with
special keyboards) before I looked at the pic, but now that I see how it's
been modified, I'm thinking some kind of proprietary page layout, prepress
or document management system?
It's interesting that the keytops are labeled with Cyrillic characters
(but not as the primary alphabet). Maybe the keyboard has some provenance
in military or intelligence applications? I'm sure it's a bog-standard Type
5 outside of the key-tops which were probably modified after the fact.
Best,
Sean
On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Electronics Plus <sales at elecplus.com>
wrote:
Pics are here:
https://plus.google.com/photos/106111250846948401252/albums/6047430172859922
513?banner=pwa
<https://plus.google.com/photos/106111250846948401252/albums/6047430172859922513?banner=pwa>
Cindy Croxton
Electronics Plus
1613 Water Street
Kerrville, TX 78028
830-792-3400 phone
830-792-3404 fax
sales at
elecplus.com
AOL IM elcpls