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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

I recently noticed that the Macbooks' Japanese Keyboard Layout is surprisingly similar to these Terminal keyboard layouts. I wonder why this is?

https://discussions.apple.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/...

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$ is on 4 and ¥ way off to the right on the Japanese keyboard?

~, Ctrl, @, etc.

The keyboards — the Japanese layout and the ADM-3A — are bit-paired, meaning that the characters on an unshifted and shifted key differ in exactly one bit in the ASCII encoding.

   SP !  "  #  $  %  &  '  (  )  *  +  ,  -  .  /
   0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  :  ;  <  =  >  ?
   @  A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O
   P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z  [  \  ]  ^  _
   `  a  b  c  d  e  f  g  h  i  j  k  l  m  n  o
   p  q  r  s  t  u  v  w  x  y  z  {  |  }  ~  DEL

Shift toggles bit 4 of the numeric and low punctuation keys (codes < 0x40), and bit 5 of the alphabetic and high punctuation keys. This made terminals easier and cheaper to build, in the days before cheap microprocessors, when encoding was done in discrete logic or, like the Teletype 33, mechanically.

Speaking of the ¥, notice how it's right under the |?

Early Japanese codepages put ¥ where ASCII has the backslash. Even today, on most (if not all) OSes render the \ as ¥ when using the Japanese locale.

Further reading: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.as...

Interesting, I think the South Koreans did the same thing.

Installing South Korean games (this was middle school), I've always wondered why the paths were showing up as :

    C:₩Program Files₩GRAVITY₩RO

And trying to type \ in the installation path input box results in ₩

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