Mystery IBM Japan monster keyboard - mystery solved

[webwit]

[webwit]

Being serious for a second: zsh might be more powerful, feature-rich-ier, faster, whatever. But sh scripts run out of the box on virtually any Unix(-like) system in existence.

Not much of a problem since you can run sh scripts from your whatever shell?

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

echo "hello world."

[lal]

True, but I don't feel the need for another shell. I prefer sticking to as few "tools" as possible to get work done in order to minimize confusion and maintenance efforts. My scripts are mostly POSIX conforming and so is my interactive use. And I like typing (surprise!), so I don't need a typing saving AI in my shell. Once I've even tried using dash as login shell, but its lack of path name completion and command history (EDIT: the latter is much worse) is just too frustrating if something's on fire...

Summary: I prefer the same shell for interactive use and scripts. And Bourne sh is the better shell for scripts in terms of porta- and durability.

[Minskleip]

I use Perl for scripting if it's too advanced for sh. Zsh for interactive shell because that's what I'm used to.

[Menuhin]

Many of you will have seen this beast before -

Spoiler:

All that was known was that it was an IBM keyboard from the 1970s. Some degree of speculation existed over what it was and what it was used for. However, while digging up information on the IBM Multistation, I discovered this info -

Chinese keyboard (V-type)
Chinese emulation only made 5250, R1, along with many mysteries keyboard type.
After all using only the keyboard, because it was more than 23 million.
The keyboard also want to see the thing most people look at management.

Those with a key 254 requires optional adapter to connect to a dedicated unit.
They key is engraved with Chinese characters in Japanese, perhaps like a typewriter, I think I have to input Chinese characters directly.

I found by chance from the site in English how to operate.
According to the report, has to be Chinese characters 12 on a single key, by pressing a number between 1 and 12 in another at the same time with that key, he seems to have become a U you to choose a Chinese character to be input

Sounds like a match for the above unit. If it is in fact the same thing, then it is an IBM 5556-005, more than likely with linear Alps Bigfoot switches.

EDIT: The above unit has 254 keys too (counted number of rows and columns, multiplied, then hand counted the other keys), so it's more than likely a match unless there was an earlier Chinese 5250 keyboard which used the same layout.

The keyboard cost 238,000¥ in early 1980s yen, which is probably equivalent to a few thousand dollars in todays money.

Sorry for the necro.
But I have done some more investigation into this giant 'keyboard' displayed in München, for the sake of future readers of this post, let me post the link here.

keyboards-f2/ibm-japan-monster-keyboard ... 15556.html