31 Dec
1998
31 Dec
'98
3:20 p.m.
On 1 Jan 1999, Eric Smith wrote:
It's called a 'bit-paired' keyboard
layout, and you can blame it on the
ASR-33 Teletype. It was much easier to build a mechanical keyboard encoder
such that unshifted and shifted characters from the same key differed by only
one bit. So 'P' (0x50) is a natural character to pair with '@' (0x40).
Similarly, the double-quote character (0x22) is the shift of the digit
'2' (0x32), and the single-quote (0x27) is the shift of the digit '7'
(0x37),
rather than having both quotes on the key to the right of the semicolon.
Cool! This is the sort of seemingly useless information that I really
like to learn about. I think its actually pretty important to know why
seemingly minor things like this are the way they are.
Thanks for the info. It makes perfect sense.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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