[Pythonmac-SIG] Key Bindings on cross platform apps.

[Nicholas Riley]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 02:52:43PM -0500, Tom Pollard wrote:
> My recollection is that the control key has been around since the  
> stone ages (ASR-33 teletypes, at least) and that many of the standard  
> control-key combinations (ctl-C, for one) had their well-defined  
> meanings long before the Mac was introduced.  For Apple to introduce a  
> command key rather than saying ctl-c no longer meant 'interrupt' but  
> now 'copy' makes sense.  That MS (or IBM, or whoever) decided to start  
> using ctl-key combinations to mirror Apple's cmd-key combinations  
> seems like the more egregious offense.  (If I'm misremembering the  
> history, please correct me.)

That's more or less it.  The Apple II had a Control key before it had
open/closed-Apple (Command/Option) keys.  The Mac Plus and earlier had
only Command-Option keys and no Control (or Escape) key, which made
terminal emulation software rather unhappy - they typically used the
Option key.  The Apple IIgs and Mac SE/II were the first machines to
get ADB, and thus keyboard compatibility between the two.  The other
II/Mac unification changes were the Escape key, renaming "Backspace"
to "Delete" and adding the (open) Apple logo to the Command key, from
which it was only recently removed.

Apple had three ADB keyboards at that point:

- the Apple Extended keyboard, the basis of every desktop Apple
  keyboard since, until the recent aluminum keyboard design
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Apple_Extended_Keyboard.jpg>

- the Apple Standard keyboard, with Control to the left of A, caps
  lock at the bottom left, escape to the left of 1 and arrow keys in
  order: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Apple_ADB_Keyboard.jpg>

- the IIgs keyboard, which was essentially a smaller version of the
  Apple Standard keyboard (and came out first):
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Apple_IIgs_Keyboard_B.jpg>

The Extended keyboard was designed to be infrequently purchased, only
by those people who wanted to run PC software on their Macs (Apple
also shipped a 5 1/4" drive to be used with Macintosh PC Exchange
around the same time), but it ended up becoming the dominant keyboard.

-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>