deskthority

They're not used in Lisp much ("lambda" is a very important keyword, but it is spelled out). APL used them, and there was probably a little APL on the LispMs. I think a bunch of academics wanted easy access to math symbols for academic papers.

BAC SPAE is like Backspace and RUB OUT is like Delete.

RETURN is just like you Enter key, while LINE is RETURN+TAB.

Ah! Thank you! I don't know why I didn't parse it that way before, but I think I get it now.

I am pretty sure that's not my ideal layout, but that's why firmware is firmware and ...

I have some time to try and work on this. I'm hoping to lay out a PCB with switches in the right locations to drive 7bit's keyboard (more or less). I have found the tools somewhat hard to use, but I'll give it a shot.

I'm a bit worried about keys with stabilizers, as I'm not sure where to get those.

I picked up one of the Symbolics keyboards from DKS after the thread started, and did hans23's modification to make it work via USB. It's cool, although I haven't really finished the project. My wife's reaction to the noise the keyboard makes was quite funny, but I suspect if I keep using it, it ...

No, it is better to have single-sized switches, so it is possible to put single caps or double caps on top of them without the need to have several different locations for switches on that PCB.If you need F5 and Escape wider, then it will be 2 units wide.
Also, users of Visual Studio and Eclipse ...

I made F5 1.5 across because I figure it gets used by programmers in Visual Studio and Eclipse. Actually, I tried putting circle, square, and triangle up there, but I didn't like the look of them. I figured interested parties could swap in better keycaps. Then I forgot that I had extra wide keys and ...

Great to read this, but what will be the layout now?

I did some thinking about this and came up with the attachment here. (I mocked up the Symbolics keyboard the same way -- files at http://ts4z.net/kbd/ for comparison)
kbd-layout-strawman.png
Obviously, this isn't a recreation of the Symbolics ...

Has anyone built a keyboard from scratch (recently)? Looking at an old Qume VT420 knockoff keyboard I found, it looks like a single-sided PCB. I know that's a lot of holes with not a lot of room for error, but it still seems possible to make one? It might make a useful prototype.

According to ...