Help With Original LISP Machine ("Space Cadet") Keyboard

[Quadibloc]

I was very pleasantly surprised some time back to find photographs of
a couple of exotic keyboards at the site

http://world.std.com/~jdostale/kbd/

Finally, finding that the advertisement for the MIT CADR machine on Al
Kossow's site showed a keyboard with the same arrangement of keys as
the Space Cadet keyboard, and finding some documentation there giving
the character set used by the LISP machine, I thought I'd try adding a
drawing of that keyboard to my own site at

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/kyb01.htm

However, while the documentation helped (it noted center-dot, circle-
plus and circle-times as characters in the character set) it seems to
have been for a more limited character set, comparable to that
provided by the SAIL system at Stanford (in both cases, the special
characters were put where the control characters would normally be, as
well).

As the photo of the RAIL terminal on the web is obscured by glare, I
wasn't able to present that keyboard either, as its layout isn't
described by any of the documents on Al Kossow's site that I hoped
might be relevant.

If anyone can suggest more information, or point out where my guesses
(center dot under the +/- and : key, sigma under the + and = key, and
the circled operators under the cursor keys with hand pictures on
them) are wrong, and what they should be, it would be appreciated.

At another spot on my site

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/lineint.htm

(unavailable for a while, I notice, due to a filename error on my
part) I've added a note that if the 1443 can use a rigid bar
(admittedly, with a comb of flexible characters, but that is not
necessary, as drum and chain printers prove) instead of a train,
chain, or belt...why not shuttle a rigid drum back and forth, for a
line printer with a larger selection of characters?

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

Post by Quadibloc
If anyone can suggest more information, or point out where my guesses
(center dot under the +/- and : key, sigma under the + and = key, and
the circled operators under the cursor keys with hand pictures on
them) are wrong, and what they should be, it would be appreciated.

.
Since the keyboard had dagger, double dagger, paragraph mark, and even
parallels, when I took a look again at the key with the unshifted
colon, the item at the front was too big for a second copy of center
dot, and the blob there did look just about the right shape... so I
put the section mark there.

Information on the keyboard noted that there was a combination of
shifts to obtain *capital* Greek letters. So I replaced sigma with the
double-wavy-line symbol (wavy line over solid line already being
present) as this was another possible interpretation of the symbol
there as best I could make it out.

And my searches turned up an old post in alt.sys.pdp-10 in which it
was noted that I *did* put the circled-X in the right spot by putting
it on the cursor left key. (I assume it's a circle left key, and the
hand drawing is used to avoid confusion with arrows as printable
characters. I find such items on keys rather silly myself, but I must
admit that using control-meta-thumbs down to kill an errant program
does have a certain appeal.)

I also presume that I, II, III, and IV are *function keys*, which got
replaced by square, circle, and triangle on the later Symbolics
keyboard.

However, in the character set apparently like that on the Thomas F.
Knight Jr. keyboard given in the Lisp Machine Manual, (called chineual
on Al Kossow's site because of how the title wraps around from the
back to the front cover?) includes a diamond character for which I
have found no place on this larger keyboard. I suspect I'm not there
yet, and I may be completely out to lunch assuming a circled minus and
circled divide character.

John Savard

[Rich Alderson]

However, in the character set apparently like that on the Thomas F. Knight
Jr. keyboard given in the Lisp Machine Manual, (called chineual on Al

^^^^^^^^

Kossow's site because of how the title wraps around from the back to the
front cover?) includes a diamond character for which I have found no place on
this larger keyboard. I suspect I'm not there yet, and I may be completely
out to lunch assuming a circled minus and circled divide character.

The Chineual was called that at MIT when it was published, for exactly the
reason you suppose. It's been called that ever since; Al is just labeling it
correctly.

The circle-plus and circle-times are symbols from matrix algebra IIRC. There
is neither a circle-minus nor a circle-divide on the keyboard.

About all I can remember of the LM keycodes is that circle-times is the Tops-20
quote character (^V), as explicitly pointed out in the Chineual.

[Al Kossow]

However, in the character set apparently like that on the Thomas F. Knight
Jr. keyboard given in the Lisp Machine Manual

I have a CADR keyboard, and even know where it is! I'll see about getting
some closeups of the keys.

[John Savard]

Post by Al Kossow

However, in the character set apparently like that on the Thomas F. Knight
Jr. keyboard given in the Lisp Machine Manual

I have a CADR keyboard, and even know where it is! I'll see about getting
some closeups of the keys.

Thank you, thank you!

However, it looks like you won't need to bother on my account... it
turns out that there was a fourth image of that keyboard on the site,
and although it was featuring the circuit board of the keyboard, it also
showed the keys about which I was uncertain in more detail.

Although I'm still not 100% sure from the available images, I think it
quite likely that I now have all the keys right.

John Savard

John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html

[Quadibloc]

Post by John Savard
However, it looks like you won't need to bother on my account... it
turns out that there was a fourth image of that keyboard on the site,
and although it was featuring the circuit board of the keyboard, it also
showed the keys about which I was uncertain in more detail.

.

Post by John Savard
Although I'm still not 100% sure from the available images, I think it
quite likely that I now have all the keys right.

.
I'm not sure *why* Google Groups didn't like this thread yesterday...

Of course, there are still plenty of other things I'm looking for.

Like the layout of the keyboard on the RAIL terminal in Stanford's
SAIL system.

Or, on the "modern" Symbolics keyboard, which does have a "symbol"
shift key, where are the special characters on the keyboard when you
use it? (Amazingly, the documentation I've seen so far doesn't discuss
such petty matters!)

Also, someone has a web site about the "MacIvory" keyboard - a
keyboard from Symbolics that connected to a Mac with a LISP processor
board inside. On this web site, someone notes that this keyboard is
the perfect keyboard for Emacs users, and wishes it to be brought
back. Well, what are its scan codes?

John Savard

[Tim Shoppa]

Post by Quadibloc
Or, on the "modern" Symbolics keyboard, which does have a "symbol"
shift key, where are the special characters on the keyboard when you
use it? (Amazingly, the documentation I've seen so far doesn't discuss
such petty matters!)

I think it's just assumed you know where all those funky characters
are. I think this was a conscious design decision to make the keyboard
be "clean", bucking the Space Cadet cluttered labeling heritage as
much as possible (of course it still has hyper-meta-super, right?)

I never used Symbolics stuff enough to memorize all the funky ones,
that's for sure.

Tim.

[Christopher C. Stacy]

Post by Quadibloc
Or, on the "modern" Symbolics keyboard, which does have a "symbol"
shift key, where are the special characters on the keyboard when you
use it? (Amazingly, the documentation I've seen so far doesn't discuss
such petty matters!)

I think it's just assumed you know where all those funky characters are.

It turned out that nobody ever used any of the funky characters at all.

[Quadibloc]

Post by Tim Shoppa

Post by Quadibloc
Or, on the "modern" Symbolics keyboard, which does have a "symbol"
shift key, where are the special characters on the keyboard when you
use it? (Amazingly, the documentation I've seen so far doesn't discuss
such petty matters!)

I think it's just assumed you know where all those funky characters
are. I think this was a conscious design decision to make the keyboard
be "clean", bucking the Space Cadet cluttered labeling heritage as
much as possible (of course it still has hyper-meta-super, right?)

.
Well, of the items on this shopping list, I finally *did* find a
manual on the web - it was the "reference cards" book for Genera -
that had the required information.

John Savard

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Quadibloc
Of course, there are still plenty of other things I'm looking for.
Like the layout of the keyboard on the RAIL terminal in Stanford's SAIL
system.

RAIL? What's that? I've used III terminals connected to the DataDisc[1] at
SAIL, but they were only ever called "Triple-I" to my knowledge.

[1] I'm pretty sure that was spelt with a "c" and not a "k".

[Quadibloc]

Post by Rich Alderson
RAIL? What's that? I've used III terminals connected to the DataDisc[1] at
SAIL, but they were only ever called "Triple-I" to my knowledge.

.
There's *one* site on the web with a picture of a keyboard from a RAIL
terminal, in a glass case in the Gates Computer Science Building:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/1-7.htm

John Savard

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Quadibloc

Post by Rich Alderson
RAIL? What's that? I've used III terminals connected to the DataDisc[1] at
SAIL, but they were only ever called "Triple-I" to my knowledge.

There's *one* site on the web with a picture of a keyboard from a RAIL
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/1-7.htm

I just took a look at that site, and it has a picture of Martin Front's SAIL
keyboard, of the kind I was talking about. Where did you get "RAIL"?

[Quadibloc]

Post by Rich Alderson
I just took a look at that site, and it has a picture of Martin Front's SAIL
keyboard, of the kind I was talking about. Where did you get "RAIL"?

,
Well, given that the name of the .jpg file has RAIL in it, and the
manual collection on Al Kossow's site for this project had manuals for
BAIL and FAIL, I naturally concluded that RAIL was the acronym for the
terminal, with the first letter perhaps standing for "Remote".

Apparently, though, this was not the case.

Anyways, I've made progress. The entire Space Cadet keyboard is on my
site, at

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/kyb01.htm

and in addition, I was finally able to locate the right manual so that
I could also show on that page the association of symbols with the
symbol shift to the keys of the later 88-key Symbolics keyboard.

For completeness' sake, I then included some information that was
considerably less hard-to-find, the option and shift-option symbols
for the Mac - no, you don't need the MacIvory boards and keyboard to
have special symbols on a Macintosh!

Then, on my page at

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/kyb03.htm

where I ramble on about the history of the keyboard on the IBM PC -
through its 83-key (PC, PC XT), 84-key (AT), and 104-key versions (I
acknowledge the *existence* of the Windows keys, but I don't go to the
trouble of showing a diagram of a typical modern keyboard with them)
and go off into vast digressions about the IBM PCjr and the 122-key
Host Connected Keyboard, and all the keyboards with a key between Z
and the left-hand shift key that IBM made *before* the PC (to try and
defend IBM from the calumny it received for that particular
characteristic of the 83-key keyboard, to show that it put a key there
in all innocence, it having been tolerated by its customers on other
equipment before) - I have now added to images of the 'ultimate'
keyboard that combined the 122-key Host Connected Keyboard with the
modern 104-key keyboard for *full* PC use with the option of 3270
emulation, a somewhat more elaborate version that would also connect
to a Sun or a Mac...but in its most outrageous developments, assumes
you'll be running a LISP machine emulator on one of the computers
you're connecting it to!

John Savard

[Christopher C. Stacy]

Post by Quadibloc
Anyways, I've made progress. The entire Space Cadet keyboard is on my
site, at
http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/kyb01.htm

The Space Cadet keyboard was based on the Knight TV keyboards,
which were in turn based on the SAIL keyboards. (Emacs was
designed for use with the Knight keyboards.)

[Quadibloc]

Post by Christopher C. Stacy

Post by Quadibloc
Anyways, I've made progress. The entire Space Cadet keyboard is on my
site, at
http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/kyb01.htm

The Space Cadet keyboard was based on the Knight TV keyboards,
which were in turn based on the SAIL keyboards. (Emacs was
designed for use with the Knight keyboards.)

.
And then, on later Symbolics machines, the Space Cadet keyboard was
replaced by the 88-key keyboard as provided with the MacIvory board
set, which didn't show the extra symbols on the keys, but which
offered a symbol assortment basically equivalent to what the Knight
keyboard did: only 32 extra characters, including a few Greek letters,
in the control character area of the code.

The TI Explorer offered the same thing, having a more conventional-
looking ASCII-style keyboard, but with the addition of the standard 8-
bit ASCII accented letters in the character set.

So the Knight keyboards were what MIT used with their PDP-10, then?

John Savard