🚀 go-pugleaf

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 <lars@salt.acc.com>   (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 !!