The Lisp keyboards

[daedalus]

I'm pretty sure the old-style Symbolics one does.

[kps]

Here is a blog post with a photo of an MIT ‘space cadet’ keyboard in an LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc.) rather than a Symbolics enclosure.

[RadikulRAM]

Guys, what are those special characters used for? I know they're greek lettering, but are they commonly used in Lisp?

[ts4z]

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.

[Muirium]

You aren't really doing science unless you're doing it in Greek!

Although I don't really believe that, I still do want Greek legends too. They look boss, and, yes, scientific.

[SL89]

I am almost surprised that people haven't commissioned replica sets.
The color scheme reminds me of your shiny custom board Muirium.

[Muirium]

On purpose! My Round 4 SPH caps are modelled on the Space Cadet.




The reason they don't have the secondary characters is, I suspect, the expense of paying for SP's tooling. Doubleshots aren't the cheapest things to remaster. But I am so up for a Greek set someday! On the top, rather than on the front where it can't be doubleshot.

[SL89]

That's kind of what i figured. I imagine the side legends would need to be printed and not double shot anyway. I find it interesting that a lot of the keys on the space cadet boards were individual switches for commands we now have. But i can't help but wonder if the HELP key brings up help on screen, or some acolyte comes running to you with a gigantic manual.

[jacobolus]

Does anyone know the story about the spherical keycaps on that 365407 “rev. A” board? It looks like for later revs they switched from spherical keycaps to using cylindrical ones, but still not the standard cylindrical space invader keycap shape. I assume they switched partly for the purpose of adding LED holes, which wouldn’t fit on the (SP DSS/DSA-like) smallish spherical tops. Or perhaps a cylindrical shape was easier to dyesub: the rev. A version looks to be pad printed or maybe infilled. Or maybe they just thought the more cylindrical shape was better.

Does anyone know if there were any other space invader keyboards which used spherical keycaps or the sorta-cylindrical ones, or was it only the symbolics boards?

Here’s a guy raving about how awesome the “rev A” spherical caps (on a MacIvory system; not sure if that’s precisely the same keyboard):
http://www.johnbear.net/symbolics-keybo ... yboard.pdf

And here’s a nice top-down high-resolution picture of one of these “rev A” boards:

(photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/88319047@N00/5085588724/)

Here’s what regular cylindrical space invader keycaps look like:

(my photo)

And here’s rev C:


(photos from http://www.globalnerdy.com/2009/02/05/h ... -keyboard/)

[drempyrean]

Hey, I recently purchased the new Symbiosis Keycaps from pimpmykeyboard.com. I was wondering how does the quality of keycaps compare to ones on these keyboards? Such as the keycap material, longevity, shine, etc..

[kbdcraft]

Wow...that's great. It looks like a comodo style keyboard.
I like these old style keyboard's design.
It shows analog emotion to me.
Thank you for rare pics, I can make a reference for my design study.

[rsbseb]

Thanks for bringing this thread back to life. I haven't seen it before. That Rev A board may have just become my dream board. I'm aleady fantasizing about a replica.

[Slom]

Does anyone know the story about the spherical keycaps on that 365407 “rev. A” board? It looks like for later revs they switched from spherical keycaps to using cylindrical ones, but still not the standard cylindrical space invader keycap shape. I assume they switched partly for the purpose of adding LED holes, which wouldn’t fit on the (SP DSS/DSA-like) smallish spherical tops. Or perhaps a cylindrical shape was easier to dyesub: the rev. A version looks to be pad printed or maybe infilled. Or maybe they just thought the more cylindrical shape was better.

Does anyone know if there were any other space invader keyboards which used spherical keycaps or the sorta-cylindrical ones, or was it only the symbolics boards?

At least one of the Symbolics 365407 keyboards with cylindrical keycaps has at least on key switch that is not a Hi-Tek space invader key switch: wiki/Symbolics_365407. Ironically it seems like it is pad printed

Spoiler:

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are riding a train through Scotland.

The engineer looks out the window, sees a black sheep, and exclaims, "Hey! They've got black sheep in Scotland!"

The physicist looks out the window and corrects the engineer, "Strictly speaking, all we know is that there's at least one black sheep in Scotland."

The mathematician looks out the window and corrects the physicist, " Strictly speaking, all we know is that is that at least one side of one sheep is black in Scotland."