Steve Thompson wrote: >I'm not sure the mag stripe on a credit card was by IBM. As I >understood it, TeleCredit of Tampa owned that patent as it had >been invented by one of their people.
I wrote "Magnetic stripes on payment and other cards (such as ID cards)," i.e. the card itself. Upon further research it still looks historically accurate. Here's IBM's point of view: https://www.ibm.com/history/magnetic-stripe As I understand it, Ron Klein claims he was first to file a *related* patent (in 1966, granted in 1969). His patent is for automating credit card validations. He does not claim he invented the magnetic strip/stripe card itself. At least not in this article where he offers his point of view: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/point-sale-pioneer-ron-klein-looks-back-2013-08-13 The work the late IBM engineer Forrest Parry and his wife, Dorothea, did (originally for the CIA) dates to 1960 -- prior art about 6 years before Klein filed his patent. Also, IBM did NOT patent its magnetic stripe card technology. (Maybe IBM didn't have a choice?) Which makes IBM's contribution that much more relevant to the "for us?" part of the subject line. Jay Maynard wrote: >1) There aer still a lot of folks who swap left-control and caps lock, and >will swear till their dying day that control must always be to the left of >A and refuse to consider any other option. They will argue that down low >where it is on basically every modern keyboard is and always will be wrong. Sure, but DEC's CTRL isn't to the left of the A key on the LK201. DEC put the CAPS LOCK key to the immediate left of the A key, then the CTRL key to the left of CAPS LOCK. That was a supremely bad arrangement. If you want to remap CAPS LOCK to CTRL, of course you can. Just like a fair number of people remap right CTRL to 3270 ENTER. But I think IBM was quite wise in keeping CTRL and CAPS LOCK well separated. While I'm complaining, DEC had the excellent insight to create the "inverted T" layout for the 4 cursor navigation keys but then placed "Next Screen" and "Prev Screen" keys *horizontally* and *adjacent* to one another. Ugh. Maybe they had flipping through the pages of a book in mind? But at least with the benefit of hindsight I don't think that was the best decision. It's inconsistent with the behavior of the inverted T keys, and it doesn't even make sense in terms of the left arrow/right arrow key positions which should be orthogonal. The arrangement of the other keys (and the keys themselves) in their chosen "magic 6" is also hard to understand. Frankly, the LK201's "magic 6" is a complete mess. I think IBM got this part right too: Page Up and Page Down arranged vertically. Same with Home and End. IBM's 6 key layout just makes a lot more sense in my view. >4) I'm typing this on a 122-key IBM keyboard with a vertical enter key, and >;'\ are right next to each other to the left of L there, too. Yes, absolutely there were variations. The 122 key layout was reasonably popular for hardcore data entry and in customer call centers, as examples. But I'm really focusing on the much more popular 101/102 key PC layout that IBM helped spread far and wide because that's the layout that still reverberates, in many good ways. The \ and | keys are important for command line work in various operating systems, so on the PC keyboard layout IBM kicked that key above the ENTER key and enlarged it slightly. Good decision, I think. >And yeah, the LK201's touch, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks >rocks. Yeah, and the (configurable) speaker clicks to simulate the sound of mechanical keystrokes somehow made the whole experience even worse. :-( However, the smooth scrolling feature was mildly entertaining for about 10 minutes. :-) ————— Timothy Sipples Senior Architect Digital Assets, Industry Solutions, and Cybersecurity IBM Z/LinuxONE, Asia-Pacific [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
