O my Lord what have we here? Service Merchandise? They seemed to be the sole supplier of the ITT Xtra pcs. I had the ITT Xtra XP, an xt/80286 hybrid (no 16 bit isa slots). The memories!! I learned how to hack games on some Origin title. A.D. 2042 or what have you. Sent with Proton Mail secure email.
On Sunday, March 10th, 2024 at 10:13 PM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > I took a second look and here are the keys that were 'locked': > Set Up > Break > Del > Line INS Char > Line DEL Char > Scrn CLR Line > INS Repl > Escape > Home > All the Arrow keys, up, down, right, left > > It's a standard ASCII Wyse Keyboard > > Doug > > On 3/10/2024 6:10 PM, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote: > > > > I thought, at first, some dirt or debris had gotten stuck there, but > > > on closer look I saw something black below the keys that seemed to be > > > stuck. I pulled a key cap off and found a U shaped piece of black > > > plastic that was put there on purpose to prevent you from depressing > > > the key. > > > > > The question came to mind; "What sort of application would be so > > > crude that you would have to prevent the user from depressing certain > > > keys?" > > > > I saw this in at least two applications: > > > > 1. The Service Merchandise chain > > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise) used serial > > terminals for their in-showroom catalog ordering. Some keys were > > blocked somehow, though I never peeled up key caps to see how. :) > > I want to say that backspace was one of the blocked keys, the > > aggravation of which is probably why I remember this. > > > > 2. CLSI library systems (LIBS100 on PDP-11). Ours here had ADM-3A > > (iirc) terminals with the break key blocked, iirc, though there were > > plenty of other ways to discombobulate the thing inadvertently. It was > > also available via dialup from keyboards that were not so modified. > > > > I once heated up a paper clip to read hot and shoved it through the stem > > of a TVI-925's SEND key, which was used for block mode functions, and > > caused the terminal to vomit screen contents back to the host. Unwanted > > presses of course produced a heck of a mess. (Older versions of our > > application ran in block mode, but you could always hit ESC-S to send > > the screen, and it was unfortunately easy, at least for me, to thwack > > SEND by mistake.) > > > > De > >
