space-cadet keyboard

A now-legendary device used on MIT Lisp machines, which

inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the

design of Emacs. It was equipped with no fewer than *seven*

shift keys: four keys for bucky bits ("control", "meta",

"hyper", and "super") and three like regular shift keys,

called "shift", "top", and "front". Many keys had three

symbols on them: a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek

letter on the front. For example, the "L" key had an "L" and

a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the

front. By pressing this key with the right hand while playing

an appropriate "chord" with the left hand on the shift keys,

you could get the following results:

L lowercase l

shift-L uppercase L

front-L lowercase lambda

front-shift-L uppercase lambda

top-L two-way arrow

(front and shift are ignored) And of course each of these

might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta,

hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you could type over

8000 different characters! This allowed the user to type very

complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of

single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were

actually willing to memorise the command meanings of that many

characters if it reduced typing time (this attitude obviously

shaped the interface of Emacs). Other hackers, however,

thought that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that

such a keyboard can require three or four hands to operate.

See cokebottle, double bucky, meta bit, quadruplebucky.

Note: early versions of this entry incorrectly identified the

space-cadet keyboard with the "Knight keyboard". Though both

were designed by Tom Knight, the latter term was properly

applied only to a keyboard used for ITS on the PDP-10 and

modelled on the Stanford keyboard (as described under buckybits). The true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the Knight

keyboard.

[Jargon File]

(1994-12-05)