Two piece keycap Unicomp

[tchuladdiass]

Everywhere I've looked, I've heard that Unicomp no longer sells keyboards with two-piece key caps.  Well the one that I just got in last week has two-piece caps on all the ones I've checked so far.  However it does take a bit of effort to remove the top piece without pulling out the stem too.  The one I got is from their custom line, a 101 white with APL symbols on it.  Could be that they have a batch of the APL keyboards in inventory from prior to switching to 1-piece caps.

On a related note, I came so close to getting a silver-label Model M -- it was sitting on the shelf at a local thrift store.  I had it in my hand, noticed there were a few key caps missing, set it down, then came back for it.  But just as I was re-approaching it,  someone else picked it up and bought it.  Moral of the story -- if you have a silver label Model M in you hand, don't let it go.

[DreymaR]

When I got my Unicomp ISO board and blank black key caps, some caps were 1-piece and some 2-piece. The 'mainstream' keys were all 1-piece.

[ch_123]

On a related note, I came so close to getting a silver-label Model M -- it was sitting on the shelf at a local thrift store.  I had it in my hand, noticed there were a few key caps missing, set it down, then came back for it.  But just as I was re-approaching it,  someone else picked it up and bought it.  Moral of the story -- if you have a silver label Model M in you hand, don't let it go.

There's one on eBay at the moment going for $40 from a good seller, which is a pretty good deal afaik.

[ironcoder]

The one I got is from their custom line, a 101 white with APL symbols on it.  Could be that they have a batch of the APL keyboards in inventory from prior to switching to 1-piece caps.

Or maybe they enconomize by using 2 piece keycaps and just print APL and foreign language key tops and slap them on as needed. That would probably make sense.

Are you an APL coder? Not many guys doing that any more. I used it waaay back and like it a lot.

[ch_123]

I'd say they just have a stack of them left over from the IBM days. I doubt they are the most commonly sold item, so they can probably live off old stock forever.

Just like the rest of their products >.>

[ironcoder]

They probably have even more emails in stock than keyboards

[tchuladdiass]

Are you an APL coder? Not many guys doing that any more. I used it waaay back and like it a lot.

I've started learning APL, specifically was looking at A+ from Morgan Stanley.  However I was going to recycle several of the APL symbols into a programming language I've been working on.  Too bad APL doesn't have a lambda symbol (as that is the one symol that I need).

On a side note, does anyone know of a simple way to map extended unicode characters (such as the APL symbols) to key combinations in X (on Linux or other unix's)?  I would like to have right-alt plus key to be one symbol, right-alt-shift-key to be another symbol, and right-alt-ctrl-key, right-alt-ctrl-shift-key to be other symbols (so I could have 4 total alternate symbols per key).  I know I'd have to probably map right-alt to "super", but not sure of the rest of the xmodmap incantations to do this.

Thanks

[quadibloc]

I found this page which discusses using xmodmap for characters that need Unicode to express them:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/X11Keymaps

And this page

http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0225855/unicapl/unicapl.html

discusses APL in Linux, including a keymap for xmodmap you can download for APL. However, it uses the Sharp APL union keyboard, not the IBM APL2 keyboard arrangement which matches the Unicomp keyboard.

[tchuladdiass]

Ok that helps.  What I had to do is remap my right-alt key to Mode_switch, then I can access two additional symbols by hitting right-alt and shift right-alt.  However several keys on my keyboard have 3 APL symbols.  How can I access the 3rd symbol if I only have shift & mode_switch to work with?  I was hoping I could configure Ctrl-Alt-key to do something, along with Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Key.

Now according to the xmodmap man page, only 4 keysyms are supported.  But an "xmodmap -pk" shows 6 symbols defined for each key.  Is this a case of the man page getting out of sync with the code (and accessing the 5th and 6th symbols not documented)?

[ironcoder]

I've started learning APL, specifically was looking at A+ from Morgan Stanley.Thanks

I guessed it was something like that. I think brokerage houses and actuaries are the only ones really using it nowadays.

[tchuladdiass]

As a follow up, I've popped several key caps off just to see if it was only the APL keys that were two-piece.  As it happens, even the non-special keys are two piece on this board.  However one thing really bothers me.  The key stems are random colors.  So far I've identified the following: light gray, dark gray, light tan, dark tan, white, pearl, red, green.  Since the stems aren't normally visible, should I let this bother me?  Am I being to OCD on this?  The only way this will matter is if I ever get a set of clear keycaps (which I'm not really planning on at the moment).  But it still gets under my skin just knowing that the board was put together with whatever left over parts were laying around.

Was this standard practice with the traditional Model M?