On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:18:34 -0500, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

[nb]
[...]

>> There are "chips" that can be programmed by semi-technical customers to
>> contain and sometimes manipulate a very wide variety of data; for small
>> lots, they would be the way to go.

<technical> Btw, they have various names, usually either "Programmable..."
or "Field programmable..."; some are called logic arrays. The least
sophisticated are the PROMs, programmable read-only memory chips; also
erasable versions, EPROMs. Some processor chips have some EPROM in them.
</technical>

> I disagree. Both Windows and UNIX can be programmed to accept
> non-QWERTY keyboard mappings.

Glad you challenged that; I appreciated it. However, it's somewhat
difficult to set up your own mapping, if none offered is close. I don't
know much about Unix/Linux key maps; best guess is that they could be done
by a capable person without the usual sort of programming. I'd expect
defining your own Windows map to be harder, but I really don't know.

When I typed the earlier message referred to, I was mostly considering a
keyboard that did its own mapping without using any different operating
system keymap.

[Trivia (almost): The Amiga 1000 keyboard had a red LED under the Caps
Lock key, with a little red plastic window in the key top.]

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath