[GreenKeys] Soviet Teletype

[Christian Gauger-Cosgrove]

On 28 December 2016 at 21:15, drlegendre . <drlegendre at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to make sense of the keyboard. Most keys have dual (literal)
> Cyrillic and Latin character markings (for instance, 'Deh' and D, 'Hah' and
> H) but some have odd pairings, like 'Ekratkaya' + J or 'bl' (hard sign) + Y.
> And others like 'Sha' and 'Shcha' have their own individual keys.
>
> What's going on there?
>
It looks to be the MTK-2 encoding:
<http://www.sensi.org/~alec/locale/other/mtk-2.html> My ability to
Russian is non-existent, but from what I can tell, letter shift works
as expected, figure shift also works pretty close to one's
expectations for ITA2 (not USTTY), though the bell character on FIGS J
has been replaced by ю ('yu'), and the national use characters (FIGS
F,G, and H) are also Cyrillic chracters. Where things get interesting
is that sending a NULL works as a third shift, putting the machine
into Cyrillic mode, where the keys now produce Cyrillic characters
instead of Latin. Though if you study the character set you'll notice
that the MTK-2 code only encodes 30 of the 33 standard Russian
Cyrillic characters, and thus it lacks: Ё ('yo'), Ч ('che'), and Ъ
('myagkij znak').

The keyboard itself is the standard Russian typewriter layout (which
corresponds to 'JCUKEN' for us who use the Latin alphabet
exclusively). Fun fact: That's the usual keyboard layout for Microsoft
Windows in Russian. The JCUKEN layout was also the one used in the
Elektronika UKNC computer:
<https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/UKNCkeyboard.png>

Cheers,
Christian
-- 
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.