The Knight keyboard, designed by Tom Knight, was used with the MIT-AI lab's bitmapped display system. The Knight keyboard
It was a precursor to the

space-cadet keyboard The space-cadet keyboard is a keyboard designed by John L. Kulp in 1978 and used on Lisp machines at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which inspired several still-current jargon terms in the field of computer science and influenced th ...

and the later Symbolics keyboard.

Influence

The Knight keyboard is notable for its influence on

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

keybindings, particularly for helping popularize the

meta key The Meta key is a modifier key on certain keyboards. It first appeared on the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) keyboard in 1970. History The Meta key first appeared on the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) keyboard in ...

, which originated with the Stanford keyboard. The layout is also noteworthy: the meta key was ''outside'' the

control key In computing, a Control key is a modifier key which, when pressed in conjunction with another key, performs a special operation (for example, ); similar to the Shift key, the Control key rarely performs any function when pressed by itself. ...

, which is opposite from the layout used on most modern keyboards, dating to the

Model M Model M designates a group of computer keyboards designed and manufactured by IBM starting in 1985, and later by Lexmark International, Maxi Switch, and Unicomp. The keyboard's many variations have their own distinct characteristics, wi ...

IBM PC keyboard The keyboard for IBM PC-compatible computers is standardized. However, during the more than 30 years of PC architecture being frequently updated, many keyboard layout variations have been developed. A well-known class of IBM PC keyboards is the M ...

, which uses the

Alt key The Alt key (pronounced or ) on a computer keyboard is used to change (alternate) the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing ''A'' will t ...

instead, and places it inward to the control key.

References

External links

* Computer keyboard types {{compu-hardware-stub