22 Dec
2010
22 Dec
'10
5:49 p.m.
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, terry stewart wrote:
Anyway, the good news is the Lisa booted just fine!
However, the bad news
is (as I suspected) all THREE of my Lisa keyboards are non-functional.
Well, not quite. One has the '4' key working on the keypad, the other has
the '/' key working. But that's it.
Then just remap those two keys to '1' and '0' (which oughta have a slash
through it).
Before the Lisa was first released, my cousin was using a Beta machine to
write Berkeley SmallTalk. It came with a trivial ap that put a keyboard
layout on the screen to use with the mouse. S'posedly that was because
they had already had at least one keyboard failure. I tried
[unsuccessfully] to make a "Twiggy" diskette out of a 360K; you need to
use the 600 Oerstedt (1.2M) blanks.
Only one key working wouldn't NECESSARILY be the keyboard itself. I
assume that you swapped and kept track of whether the working key stayed
with the machine or keyboard?
I don't know which kind of keyboard mechanism those had. If you
repeatedly over and over and over and over, press another key will it
begin to work intermittently? If so, then it is a job for a Rochester
DynaTyper! (or KGS-80). It took less than a MB of plain (manuscript) text
to restore one of my TRS80 keyboards.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com