Random832 wrote:
Except for the fact that the actual keyboard that Emacs was originally developed for [the Knight Keyboard, and the later Symbolics "Space Cadet" Keyboards] had the control key more or less where it is on modern PC keyboards [slightly further to the right, so easier to reach with the thumb of the same-side hand]
If it's reachable with the thumb, that's actually quite a big difference, because the thumb is much stronger than the little finger, therefore better suited for a key that's so frequently used.
Meanwhile, users of Unix systems were stuck with terminals like the ADM-3A and VT-100, which, inherited from the ASR-33 but one must assume the real reason was to save money,
Probably they never anticipated that the control key would become such a frequently-used key. All the commonly-used ASCII control characters (CR, LF, TAB etc.) had their own dedicated keys, so you only needed to use the control key for characters that were rarely used before things like Emacs came along. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
