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The Racal-Norsk KPS-10 Lisp Prototype Keyboard

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http://www.kbdmania.net/xe/1525710

2010.05.05 09:58:33 (*.146.8.13)

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The Racal-Norsk KPS-10 Lisp Prototype Keyboard

I earlier bought two Symbolics keyboards from Peter Paine, a Lisp and Symbolics guru from England. He mentioned he needed a new home for one of his keyboards, shown here on his site.

He had some health problems, so it took a while, but here's what I got:

- The Racal-Norsk KPS-10 ("Knowledge Process System") Lisp Prototype Keyboard
- Racal-Norsk Mouse by Mouse Systems
- The Top Secret Design documents for the Keyboard & Mouse (they go together, it's one system with a high res monitor)
- Mouse manual
- Some kind of power module

Racal-Norsk was a UK company, a symbiosis of British Racal Electronics and Norwegian Norsk Data. The objective was to make a multi-user Lisp Machine. Peter was working with Symbolics system at the time and was press-ganged into working at Racal-Norsk in lisp software.

They built a Lisp Machine based on the Norsk Data multi-port processor (ND-570 and ND-550) and MIT ZetaLisp (circa 1984/5).

As far as Peter knows the keyboard is the only one of its kind. One of the people who was working at the company at the time was Richard Stallman. Peter Richards was involved in the design of the keycaps. The objective was to make the ultimate lisp I/O experience, but this was the first and last prototype.

At the very time that the first Lisp image came up, Racal and Norsk pulled the plug on the company and fired everyone. The project was moth-balled and presumably sleeps in some dungeon to this day. It could have been something significant, and a ~20 man team worked away for 2 years to create a formal specification of MIT Zetalisp (for many the grand-daddy of Lisps). Racal-Norsk bought the worldwide rights to MIT Zetalisp outside the USA.

The yellow nature isn't the tradional yellowed plastic from sunlight, it's the nature of the prototype material.

More information and pictures at geekhack here!