space-cadet keyboard

n. 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 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 front-shift-L top-L
(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. The keyboard of the
Symbolics Lisp machine was a simplified version, lacking Top and Front keys,
that could only send about 2000 characters. Many hackers were actually
willing to memorize the command meanings of that many characters if it
reduced typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS).
Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill,
and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to
operate. See bucky bits , cokebottle , double bucky , meta bit , quadruple
bucky. Simplified Symbolics version of the space-cadet keyboard (Some
relatively bad photographs of the earlier, more elaborate version are
available on the Web.). 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 modeled on the Stanford keyboard (as
described under bucky bits ). The true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the
first Knight keyboard. An early space-cadet keyboard (The next cartoon in
the Crunchly saga is 73-05-20. The previous one is 73-05-18.

