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Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

journal.spencerwnelson.com

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Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#21

Post by erwincoumans »

kragen wrote: post #13

Nelson seems to have been using a Rigol benchtop scope and some proprietary software that came with his generic logic analyzer. But from long experience I'm wary of investing my time in proprietary vendor tools. Does anyone have a good overview of the free-software signal-analyzer-software/oscilloscope-software landscape? I've played with sigrok a little bit, enough to get it to decode some PS/2 signals I captured on…

Check out this DSO: https://www.tindie.com/products/earth_people_technology/open...

btw, some people tried to reverse engineer and rewrite the firmware for this Rigol https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/rigol-ds10xxz-firmwar...

Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#22

Post by pkaye »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #3

Never did electronics, so when I've read of logic analyzers in a book, it sounded like something between an oscilloscope and a complex gadget out of a story from Isaac Asimov. It's surprising they're so simple, cheap and effective.

A while back Cypress made a programmable chip that had USB capability, programmable general purpose IO and DMA for efficient data transfer. This turned out to be just what as needed to make cheap logic analyzers for hobbyists.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/logic-analyzer-that-i...

Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#23

Post by mcshicks »

kragen wrote: post #13

Nelson seems to have been using a Rigol benchtop scope and some proprietary software that came with his generic logic analyzer. But from long experience I'm wary of investing my time in proprietary vendor tools. Does anyone have a good overview of the free-software signal-analyzer-software/oscilloscope-software landscape? I've played with sigrok a little bit, enough to get it to decode some PS/2 signals I captured on…

You might try asking your question over at the eevblog forum. I have a Rigol scope and when I wanted to use a linux host I found a driver for it over there. So in terms of host side options there is quite a bit. I think this was the one I used[1]. For myself the cost and performance of the hardware usually outweighs anything else. I also have an analog discovery 2 (diligent) and it seems like they have some open source offering as well[2] (which I haven't tried). They do have a linux client for their host side which was good enough for me.

[1] https://github.com/wd5gnr/qrigol

[2] https://github.com/Digilent/waveforms-live

Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#25

Post by saulrh »

thought_alarm wrote: post #4

I like to think that there's an alternate universe where the entire industry adopted NeXT's idea of replacing the dedicated Caps Lock key with a Command+Shift key combination, because it's such a smart and obviously correct thing to do. Sadly, I'll never live in that universe.

I kind of do - I have caps lock remapped to lcontrol and lcontrol remapped to lwin, so the leftmost column of my keyboard looks like ~, tab, lcontrol, lshift, lwin from top to bottom. If I need control+shift I just hit control with the flat of my pinky instead of the tip so it also catches shift, and if I need shift+command I hit shift with the flat of my pinky instead of the tip so it catches command too. It's not perfect, but it a lot easier on my wrist than other configurations I've attempted.

Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#26

Post by HeckFeck »

technothrasher wrote: post #11
Bud wrote: post #2

Had one of these with my original NeXT Cube that I bought new while in grad school. Still one of my favorite keyboards ever. And the Cube itself was so far ahead of everything else out there at the time that it felt like pure magic.

> And the Cube itself was so far ahead of everything else out there at the time that it felt like pure magic. Ah, the good old days, when I used to argue with my buddy that my SGI Indigo was more magical than his NeXTcube. It was even more fun than the old Mac/PC arguments. The Android/iOS fights today just don't have the same lustre.

Maybe because it had an undertone of friendly rivalry, in good old Unix hacker fashion?

I admittedly enjoy the passion shown on both sides of any divisive issue in this peculiar realm: vi vs Emacs, sysd vs sysv, xorg vs Wayland, etc.

Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#27

Post by rzzzt »

kragen wrote: post #13

Nelson seems to have been using a Rigol benchtop scope and some proprietary software that came with his generic logic analyzer. But from long experience I'm wary of investing my time in proprietary vendor tools. Does anyone have a good overview of the free-software signal-analyzer-software/oscilloscope-software landscape? I've played with sigrok a little bit, enough to get it to decode some PS/2 signals I captured on…

I've read nice things... a long time ago about the Bus Pirate wrt. protocol analysis/exploration (maybe not for high speeds): http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate

Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#28

Post by duskwuff »

pkaye wrote: post #22
ASalazarMX wrote: post #3

Never did electronics, so when I've read of logic analyzers in a book, it sounded like something between an oscilloscope and a complex gadget out of a story from Isaac Asimov. It's surprising they're so simple, cheap and effective.

A while back Cypress made a programmable chip that had USB capability, programmable general purpose IO and DMA for efficient data transfer. This turned out to be just what as needed to make cheap logic analyzers for hobbyists. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/logic-analyzer-that-i...

> A while back

Still in production, still incredibly useful.

Re: Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

#30

Post by brirec »

thought_alarm wrote: post #4

I like to think that there's an alternate universe where the entire industry adopted NeXT's idea of replacing the dedicated Caps Lock key with a Command+Shift key combination, because it's such a smart and obviously correct thing to do. Sadly, I'll never live in that universe.

As others have mentioned, programmable keyboards will give you this — I have a keyboard powered by QMK, and I programmed it such that lshift + rshift = caps
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