28 Feb
2000
28 Feb
'00
1:48 p.m.
On Mon, Feb 28, 2000 at 08:40:31PM -0500, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote:
What I find most amusing is the sheer number of
'modifier' keys on the
keyboard. Caps-lock, shift, symbol, hyper, super, meta, control, and
mode-lock. Plus perhaps one or two more which work as modifiers but which
I don't recognise as such.
I briefly was allowed to use the Slimebolics 3600 (??) that RPI used to have,
and I remember the keyboard as being completely *insane*. As in, you had to
stare into the sea of keys for a while before you even noticed the QWERTY part.
Really vast... And the command processor seemed to have TOPS-20-like command
completion, only it was turned on all the time (not just when you press ESC)
so stuff would jump in front of the cursor while you were typing (and IIRC
the capitalization would be "fixed" after you went by?). All a bit florid
for my tastes but anyway I certainly respect it when a project goes all out
like that, it certainly *felt* a lot more luxurious than a Sun running KCL
or whatever the other machines were doing. I never really got the hang of
thinking in Lisp though...
John Wilson
D Bit