[rescue] Re: keyboard fun...

Sheldon T. Hall shel at cmhcsys.com
Sat May 1 00:59:29 CDT 2004


 Lionel Peterson says ...
>
> My DEC Pro/350 has a "do" key - seemed obvious once I thought about it...

Heh.  Special keys.

One of my projects, long ago and far away, was porting Peachtree Software's
"office productivity suite" to the Epson QX-10 computer.  It seems that
Epson had a ship-load of the things (I was told "50,000, at least") already
on the way from Japan, and the US producer of the ValDocs software wasn't
nearly ready for the roll-out.

The QX-10 was a Z80 box, and, while ValDocs was written in Forth and used
its own OS, there was also CP/M for the thing, and that's what we would be
using underneath our stuff.

Our software was fine on the thing, but we couldn't handle their special
"HASCII" keyboard and all its weird keys.  For one thing, it had an "un-do"
key, and we didn't have any sort of undo functionality in our product.

One day, the Epson product manager came to see us, and I asked him about
that key...

"So, Steve, the thing has an 'un-do' key, but where's the 'do do' key?"

"It doesn't need one.  ValDocs is the do-do."

-Shel



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