Oddball Terminals (Was: Re: VT100's)

[Guy Sotomayor Jr]

> On Sep 7, 2018, at 4:15 PM, Frank McConnell via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sep 7, 2018, at 12:00, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
>> interesting.. the vt71t has inverted-T cursor keys
> 
> And CAPS LOCK in the home row to the left of the A key.  The VT220 made it w-i-d-e.  Can we now fix the blame for the two of the three worst ideas in computer keyboard design on d|i|g|i|t|a|l?  (#3 would be sending CONTROL to live in the spacebar row and I think maybe we need to blame IBM for that.)
> 

No, there were terminals that had a (small) control key down near the space bar long before IBM did it with the PC.  I can’t recall which at the moment (but I recall having to deal with them in the mid-to-late 70’s).

I also looked at the keyboards on my Symbolics machines, and where I’d like to have the control key is the “rubout” key.  But given that there are no fewer than 5 “shift” keys on the Symbolics keyboard (hyper, super, meta, control, shift…I can’t recall at the moment if symbol is also a “shift” key), it makes a bit of sense to have them all near each other.  ;-)

TTFN - Guy