‏بوكيبلينكي

It had 4 keys for bucky bits, 3 shift keys. You could chord all 4 bucky bits by shifting your left hand over to the bottom left

Emacs was developed on this keyboard. Chording C-M-S-H-b involved basically two keypresses: mashing with left hand, tapping b

8,000 characters could be typed on it, easily. It was easy to map pretty much any key combo you wanted to something

Emacs, ported to IBM-based keyboards, was irreparably mutilated. No amount of xmodmap/elisp hacking could regain the affordances

Emacs, on a modern keyboard, *has* to be tweaked in order to be functional. You need to remap capslock to ctrl

And no matter how much you tweak your keybindings, it will not match that ease of chording.

Vi also suffered. You need to remap esc to something, almost anything else. And remap capslock to ctrl

Notice: the hjkl keys had arrows on them. The Home key was also the ~ key.

Both editors suffered when transplanted from their native environments to the IBM M-class keyboard, not designed by or for hackers.

It was not designed by or for hackers, but for secretaries of rich assholes who couldn't be arsed to learn how to type.

The IBM keyboard wasn't even optimized for dictation. These rich fucks also hired secretaries with steno keyboards for that.

No, the IBM keyboard was designed entirely around the need of a secretary to enter text from a piece of paper, into a computer.

Notice how the ctrl key was where capslock is. All the copypaste commands were natural finger movements

Would you be willing to write this up as an article for @opensourceway? It's an excellent piece of history + UX which we should share widely

It's all already been written about

Fair 'nuff. Should you wish to add your voice/perspective to that discussion just let me know. I think it would be valuable.