Dvorak keyboard mapping and hp2621's

[hansen at pegasus.UUCP]

For those of you who have Hewlett Packard HP2621 A or P terminals which have
the multi-language feature (only the newer ones, I don't know if the older
A's and P's or the new HP2621B's have the feature available), there is a
small curiosity you may want to investigate: the keyboard circuitry also has
a Dvorak mapping available! 

With the labels showing, type shift-config (shift-home). This should bring
up the configuration tables. If the left hand soft label doesn't have the
word "language" showing, you're out of luck. Type shift-language (shift-home
again). This should bring up another set of soft labels with various
countries listed. (Typically in the US, the right-most label will have a
star in it after the "US".) The left hand soft label should be blank this
time. Now type control-shift-blank_soft_key (control-shift-home). Voila!
The letters "DV" should appear in the blank and your keyboard is now mapped
for the Dvorak keyboard. (Type shift-US or whatever other language you use
to get back to what you had before. Type the "unlabelled" key once to get
out of language mode and once more to get out of config mode to get back to
the screen.)

To go one step further, the keys themselves are very easy to pry off and
shuffle around. You may as well, because all of the control keys are also
shuffled around as well as the other keys. You now have yourself an
honest-to-goodness Dvorak keyboard.

I learned about this the hard way. One day my terminal hit a glitch and all
of a sudden all my letters were coming out of strange places. Instead of
qwerty, I'd get *,.pyf. Instead of asdfghjkl;, I'd get aoeuidhtns.
Fortunately, someone else in my group who had had this problem once before
was able to tell me what had happened, so I wasn't dead for too long.

Now why didn't HP advertise this "feature"? Perhaps for the same reason that
they didn't advertise the fact that one of their calculators had a built-in
stop watch? I certainly know, but I think they could have sold more
terminals if they had.

					Enjoy!
					Tony Hansen
					pegasus!hansen