wht@n4hgf.Mt-Park.GA.US (Warren Tucker) (05/29/91)
I delightfully purchased a new Keytronics KB3270 Plus keyboard the other day with a mind to adapting it for extra X11 function keys for a process control application as well as my personal use (I am a quadriplegic and using and mice are not my best friends). I searched the document, noted the usual MS-DOS manipulation programs and figured I would just call the nifty 800 number and ask for programming instructions so I can build up a UNIX driver to initialize after starting up. Er, wrong. The technician I reached at Keytronics informed me that the information would not be available without a non- disclosure agreement. I didn't realize I was buying a proprietary product, I said. No, no, it isn't proprietary at all, he responded. We just have business interests to protect. So what does proprietary mean? Well, er... I explored a few lines of reasoning with him before determining we would get no where and he declined to offer me any further avenue. I told him I would be spreading the word on this, lest anyone else think he could buy the product and get the dope on it later. He said, whatever. So here is whatever. The KB 3270 Plus is a clever marriage between a 3270 and 101-key AT arrangement. I say clever, for the keyboard is clearly intended for 3270 users, yet the AT functions, where different, are marked on the keytops in blue. DIP switches select the power-up mode, selecting between various 3270 emulation softwares' expectations and a native AT-101 arrangement arrangement. When in the AT-101 mode, the "extra" keys (PF13-PF24, Help, Clear, etc.) are not useful, generating useless or no scan codes or duplicates of other keys. All is not lost, for there is also a feature which enables one to customize the scan codes sent by individual keys. It is this feature I hoped to exploit under UNIX. While the .EXE files cannot help me under UNIX, I wrongly figured it would be a trivial matter to obtain the necessary information and build a driver for the old trusty UNIX box to load the keyboard at startup time. Wrong. I guess I have come too far from the places where device application information is considered more a potential weapon than a sales aid and a right of the device purchaser. Even the Old Day IBM spilled its guts on programming the IBM 3270 Display System. So I scrap the multi-unit plans for my process control application and when I have time I'll grovel with disassemblers and try to come up with enough information for my own gimp-use and salvage my $230 investment. Right now, it is sitting here looking sorta like Peewee Herman's bicycle: a good and useful bicycle, but with lots of extra whistles and doojiggers that don't really do anything. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Warren Tucker, TuckerWare gatech!n4hgf!wht or wht@n4hgf.Mt-Park.GA.US Many [Nobel physics] prizes have been given to people for telling us the universe is not as simple as we thought it was. -Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time In computing, there are no such prizes. -me