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From: kevin@ttidca.TTI.COM (Kevin Carothers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.editors
Subject: Re: keyboards
Message-ID: <2755@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 21 Jun 88 01:13:40 GMT
References: <5024@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <1988Jun13.195851.1729@utzoo.uucp> <556@ecrcvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: kevin@ttidcb.tti.com (Kevin Carothers)
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 37


in article (????) johng@ecrcvax.UUCP (John Gregor):

>How about foot pedals?  Namely shift, cntrl, ESC (for EMACS), and return.
>
>One of these days, when I find a good footswitch, I performing some
>surgery on my terminal.  I'll let the world know what happens...
>
>Has anybody else tried this???
>>

There *IS* (or *was* ?) a company that was producing a foot pedal 
"ESC" switch (they advertised in "The DEC Professional, and possibly
"Hardcopy" magazines). This worked quite well (I'm told) with EDT
on PDP-11's, and it was only advertised VT-100 compatible.

It actually seems rather more useful to design a footswitch that 
would make the next character typed a "CTL" character, because this
is the key that requires "goofy-handing" most often...

Unfortunately, given the async-serial  characteristics of most
(ie; "non-IBM") type computer terminals, this is, to my understanding,
a rather (as we in the computer business say) non-trivial problem.


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