LISP Knight Keyboard

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

Knight keyboard. Made around 1974.

Novena  Knight keyboard 16277937833-s
Knight keyboard with Novena laptop, 2015. 2592×1944 [photo by Mike McMahon (aka MMcM). Image source flickr, © ❮https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode❯ ]

Knight keyboard is used for CONS lisp machine, and also initially used by the CADR lisp machine, but the CADR switched to the newer Space Cadet Keyboard around 1980. [source: 2019-02-28 email, Tom Knight confirmed to Lars Brinkhoff]

Tom Knight confirmed to me the Knight TV and Knight keyboards were inspired by the SAIL Data Disc and the SAIL keyboard. It was used by the CONS lispm. Initially also with the CADR, but the CADR switched to the newer Space-cadet keyboard around 1980.

[ 2019-02-28 email from Lars Brinkhoff http://lars.nocrew.org/ ]

lisp knight keyboard
Knight keyboard 〔image source Knight (TK) keyboard At http://world.std.com/~jdostale/kbd/Knight.html

Tom Knight

Tom Knight is an American synthetic biologist and computer engineer, who was formerly a senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a part of the MIT School of Engineering.

In 1967 Knight wrote the original kernel for the ITS operating system, that ran on PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers.

In 1968, Knight designed and supervised the construction of the first PDP-10 ARPANET interfaces with Bob Metcalfe.

In 1972, Knight designed one of the first semiconductor memory-based bitmap displays…

In 1974, Knight designed and implemented the prototype version of the MIT Lisp Machine processor…

Wikipedia Tom Knight (scientist)

2019-02-28 thanks to Lars Brinkhoff for info. • http://lars.nocrew.org/https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff

Pictures and Knight TV and more info at

Knight TV and keyboard By Lars Brinkhoff. At https://github.com/PDP-10/its/wiki/Knight-TV-and-keyboard