The APL*PLUS ‘dead key’ Problem ...

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 118

I hope that one of your readers may be able to tell me how to solve the ‘dead key’ problem on UK PS/2 keyboards when using STSC APL*PLUS/PC and the Unified keyboard. The key is immediately to the left of ‘Z’, has a key button number of 45, a scan code of 86 and in DOS it produces ‘/’ when unshifted and ‘|’ when shifted. Apparently this key does not exist on American keyboards, whose left-hand shift key is wider than those on the UK keyboard.

STSC say that they believe that the scan code for this key is 86 and that their ⎕POKE 198 197 code should work with this key, although they do not have a UK keyboard with which to test this belief. In my experience, this key remains dead despite poking characters into the 86th row of the keyboard table. I have even poked into every one of the twenty or so empty rows in the 128-row keyboard table without having any effect on this key. Incidentally, the shifted ‘/’ above ‘8’ on the numeric pad, which also produces a ‘/’ seems also to be unchangeable.

An assembler routine executed via )CMD confirms the BIOS scan code of 86. If any of your correspondents has a solution I am sure I shall not be the only grateful reader.

Yours sincerely,

Cedric Heddle,
APL Impetus Ltd.