Xref: utzoo comp.std.misc:158 comp.windows.misc:1159 comp.misc:6555 comp.periphs:1908 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!anise!salt.acc.com!lars From: lars@salt.acc.com (Lars J Poulsen) Newsgroups: comp.std.misc,comp.windows.misc,comp.misc,comp.periphs Subject: Re: User Interface Standards -- *Keyboards!* Keywords: keyboards,standardize,plug-n-play,freedom Message-ID: <931@anise.acc.com> Date: 15 Jul 89 00:04:22 GMT References: <115518@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <29607@ism780c.isc.com> Sender: news@anise.acc.com Followup-To: comp.std.misc Organization: Advanced Computer Communications, Santa Barbara, California Lines: 40 In article <29607@ism780c.isc.com> marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein) writes: >The Feb. 1868 issue of CACM, page 126, has an article titled "Proposed USA >Standard, General Purpose Alphanumeric Keyboard Arrangement for Information >Interchange". An editor's note says "The proposed American standard has been >accepted for final letter ballot and concurrent publication by a Subcommittee >of the USA Standards Institute". I don't know the outcome of that ballot. > >However, even if it was approved, it would not help C programers because >the locationsof the characters [ ] \ | { } ^ were not prescribed. It looks like the above date is wrong. I don't think CACM has been published for over a hundred years. If the date is 1968, the end result was that TWO layouts were standardized, (a) one known as "typewriter-pairing", which blessed the IBM typewriter keyboard, and (b) one called "bit-pairing" which was laid out to make the shift key always toggle just one bit. Subsequently, US manufacturers of terminal equipment went for the "typewriter-pairing" layout; this caused all sorts of problems for European resellers (where the local language needed additional letters). The bit-pairing keyboard would have allowed this with virtually no modification, but the typewriter-pairing keyboards did not allow national adaptation until technology advanced far enough to send all keystrokes through a lookup table in an EPROM. A typewriter pairing keyboard has <> above comma and period; a bit-pairing keyboard has ";" over "," and ":" over ".". I prefer bitpairing keyboards, but can never find them, and I hate even more to always run with patched software, so I type six-finger: All of left hand, but only one finger on the right hand. In the late 1970-es I was a National tech support person for the Danish distributor of Wang Office Systems, and spent a LOT of time bickering with the marketing people in Lowell, Mass about requirements for nationally acceptable keyboards. / Lars Poulsen (800) 222-7308 or (805) 963-9431 ext 358 ACC Customer Service Affiliation stated for identification only My employer probably would not agree if he knew what I said !!