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:
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.
(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.
