Unshifted parentheses

MMcM

23 Nov 2019, 05:14

The recent work around the Licon / ITW magnetic valve switches reminded me to look at the photos of Haata's collection of such boards. Which includes a Cortron board with remarkable parens surrounding the number row. Which got me thinking about the periodic recurrence of unshifted parentheses.

Full Keyboards without Shift keys

Particularly on early typewriters:
But also:
  • Kanji Tablet, over on the right with all kinds of other JIS brackets.
  • Linotype, in the middle of the blue keys (and possibly configured instead for small-caps A and Q).
LISP and LISP Machines

Mostly a matter of trading off ()[] for []{}. Which also means that the keycaps have both.
Note that the Knight keyboard only had shifted parens. Same for the standard MacIvory AEK key mappings, though this was changeable in software.

Also belonging in this list would be HONEYB and, of course, Hyper7.

Numerical Keypads and Numpads

For the Apple IIe:
More recently, the Microsoft Office Keyboard has parens above the numpad, on the face of the PrtScn and ScrLk keys. The paren function is enabled unless F-Lock is turned on. (Also, it's based on science.)

Logitech has some wireless keypads with similar keys, like the N305.

These tend to send ALT 0 4 0/1 instead of the real keypad paren HID codes.

The Qisan Magicforce Keypad has parens as the lower legends, but I believe that the fn shift is in fact needed to get them, so they don't count.

I imagine there must be other early one-offs like that Cortron which just happened to have them someplace in a (what now seems) nonstandard layout.
Last edited by MMcM on 02 Dec 2019, 03:50, edited 1 time in total.

Findecanor

23 Nov 2019, 07:51

MMcM wrote:
23 Nov 2019, 05:14
More recently, the Microsoft Office Keyboard has parens above the numpad, on the face of the PrtScn and ScrLk keys.
Several of MIcrosoft's more recent keyboards have it too:
MS Natural Keyboard 4000/7000 and the successor named only "Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard". The 4000 has some shenanigans going on to send the correct key-codes over USB despite them not being officially supported by Windows ...

BTW. I absolutely detest the "Office Keyboard" and its siblings. Prime examples of how to not design a key switch and wrist rest.

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kps

25 Nov 2019, 18:51

MMcM wrote:
23 Nov 2019, 05:14
[*]TI Explorer. I thought someone still had a surviving keyboard, but I can't find any images.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/two_pi_r/ ... 4319263903

It's the one you have listed as Xerox:
MMcM wrote:
23 Nov 2019, 05:14
[*]Xerox 1109. Done by putting special caps on the bracket keys?
… whereas the keyboard on my 1109 looks like this, and the older thick version looked like this (an 1109 Dandetiger is an 1108 Dandelion with an added FPU card).

(Now I'll go reply on Twitter.)

MMcM

02 Dec 2019, 04:02

kps wrote:
25 Nov 2019, 18:51
It's the one you have listed as Xerox:
Fixed. Thanks.

Do you know whether this was an existing board with new keycaps or a from-scratch design?
kps wrote:
25 Nov 2019, 18:51
the keyboard on my 1109
The RCS/RI folks don't seem to have any images online of the D-machine I gave them years ago (together with a Space Cadet).

I'm afraid I didn't have any recollection of what the keyboard looked like. Hence the confusion.

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kps

02 Dec 2019, 21:12

MMcM wrote:
02 Dec 2019, 04:02
Do you know whether this was an existing board with new keycaps or a from-scratch design?
I don't know much about the Explorers. My understanding is that they were based on of the MIT LISP machine design, and that TI did not have any non-LISP workstations at the time.

The keyboard of the IBM-PC competitor TI Professional Computer appears to be the same underlying keyboard with fewer keys. See https://archive.org/details/byte-magazi ... /page/n287 and also p303.

There are a couple photos of an Explorer keyboard without a case here, showing that it was made by Honeywell.

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