Strange Behavior Of Keyboard Using BASIC

[Cliff Chism]

I just built my Altair Duino Experimenter 2.52 (Thanks Chris!) and everything seems to be working perfectly after fixing one cold solder joint... except for a strange behavior by the keyboard.

I am using a keyboard from "the list", a KX100 RGB (same one that Ricky Bryce has) and I am seeing that the backspace key does not work when I load BASIC from the ROM, but does anytime I've loaded it from floppy or hard drive. It seems to work anywhere else I've tried it, so far, as well.

Has anyone (with or without this keyboard) experienced this same behavior or do I need to start looking for the reason?

Thank you for any help offered.

Cliff

[John Galt]

this is normal.

The older versions of basic would use underscore _ or a rubout \ to indicate an edit. early terminals didn't have backspace or delete keys.

disk basic is more robust and came later with more advanced terminals.

you want to consult the manual for your version of basic 

an example:

  100 X=\=X\Y=10   

  Typing two RUBOUTS deleted the '=' and 'X' which were subsequently replaced by Y= .   

it can be really confusing and many people would kill the line and start to retype it over.

[Cliff Chism]

Thank you John Galt. As much as I followed the Altair in 1975, I have no recollection of reading of this. But, in the back of my mind, I suspected something like it. I have a LOT of manuals to read, but I couldn't resist just playing a little before I settled in for a good read. Thank you again for the reply.

[peterq...@gmail.com]

It needed to work this way to be usable on a printing terminal like a teletype.