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To: dayglored
Those of us old enough to remember when the first Macs came out without a keyboard because the mouse was all you needed, and the first terminal emulators had to have a pull-down menu for a keyboard in case the user was on a mouse-only machine, think "The Wheel" is uproariously funny.

I believe your memory is a tad faulty, dayglored. The original Macintosh as released on January 22, 1984, came with a keyboard and a mouse. What it lacked and people complained about were cursor keys for keyboard navigation. Apple's response was that the mouse was sufficient for moving around text windows.


139 posted on 07/07/2010 1:32:05 PM PDT by Swordmaker (Remember, the proper pronunciation of IE is AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!)
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To: Swordmaker
Yep, there's the keyboard


140 posted on 07/07/2010 1:53:59 PM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: Swordmaker
> I believe your memory is a tad faulty, dayglored. The original Macintosh as released on January 22, 1984, came with a keyboard and a mouse. What it lacked and people complained about were cursor keys for keyboard navigation. Apple's response was that the mouse was sufficient for moving around text windows.

Swordmaker, my apologies, you are absolutely correct.

I scratched my head for a while, and finally figured out where I made my memory error.

When the Macintosh first appeared, my main computer at work was a DEC LSI-11/23 running RSX-11/M, with a 9600-baud line to a VT-100 terminal. The VT-100 had a keypad that was used for numeric entry by accountants, and for editing by the rest of the world.

My editor of choice was DEC's "EDT" (EDT Text Editor), which made extensive use of the editing keypad -- it was highly programmable and you did nearly everything (except enter raw text) with the keypad.

The original Macintosh had no keypad (and as stated, no cursor keys).

So for me, especially using it as a terminal emulator, not having a keypad was as bad as not having any keyboard at all. So I guess I'm not too surprised that that is the way I remembered it... :)

If I'd known Vi better at that point I'd have used it; instead I drifted towards Emacs.

I do correctly recall the pull-down menu of keys in the terminal emulator programs -- but the menu was the keypad, not the entire keyboard.

Sorry about that, and thanks for the correction!

142 posted on 07/07/2010 4:20:13 PM PDT by dayglored (Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!)
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