[geeks] new keyboard goodness

[der Mouse]

> And it also makes me wonder about those heavily chorded keyboards of
> days gone by - like the Space Cadet keyboard [1] - how well were
> complex key combinations like hyper-meta-shift-S supported?

Well.

Modifier keys - keys that are, in the intent of the keyboard designer,
commonly held down along with others - are often handled specially in
some way, such that they are outside the whole rollover issue.

This is fine, until you want to map things differently, such as the
moderately common swapping of left control with caps lock on peecee
keyboards: control is a modifier key while caps lock is not (in this
sense).

Fortunately, that particular case has become common enough that
keyboard designers may well now be designing caps lock as a modifier.
But that's a patch for one particular case, not a fix for the real
problem.

> Did these keyboards suffer from similar rollover issues?

The Lisp Machine keyboard which is the closest I've ever used did not,
as far as I cna recall, exhibit any such issues.  While I don't recall
testing for them, either, it also occurs to me that they were not
designed in a race-to-the-bottom environment the way so many peecee
keyboards today are, so the designers may well have done it right and
"splurged"[%] on the necessary hardware to make all keys completely
independent of all other keys - diodes, for example, if using a matrix
design.

[%] Quotes because I don't really consider this splurging.

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