25 Mar
2016
25 Mar
'16
10:27 p.m.
On 24/03/2016 16:28, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
And the keyboard locks! You cannot press a key unless
the machine has finished transmitting the
previous key. “two key rollover” was a great advance in its day.
In the late 1970s or early 1980s I worked over a summer in a repair shop
for equipment manufactured by the German company Kienzle Apparate GmbH.
Their keyboards were a marvel of electromechanical engineering. When a
key was pressed the remaining keys were *physically locked*, preventing
a second key from getting pressed. This was supposed to provide the
operators with tactile feedback when they accidentally pressed more than
one key. Maybe gratuitous over-engineering, such as this, contributed to
the company's decline and the eventual takeover by Manessmann (1981) and
then DEC (1991).