Re: Emacs terminology (not again!?) [was: Apologia for bzr]

[David Kastrup]

grischka <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>> If viewed in the grand overall scheme of things, it begs the question if
>> we are doing Emacs a favor by giving it the piano keyboard more people
>> think they know how to work with.
>
> I don't think the piano keyboard is the problem. It is more the
> heap of wires and buttons behind it that may look to you like an
> accordion but really is a 1960s Moog vacuum tube synthesizer.

More like the 1950s.  Those things were called "Electronium" and part of
Hohner's master plan to organize the accordionists nobody wanted to play
with into "accordion orchestras".

<URL:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eml7J7zi4gA>

The real chutzpah here is claiming "bellows-controlled volume".  Those
things did not actually use the (operative) bellows as much for volume
control but for cooling: the simple LC oscillators tended to have quite
a bit of temperature drift.  There was a hinge-and-spring mechanism
basically turning the whole instrument into one clumsy volume pedal: the
volume was solely determined by how much you pulled the instrument
apart.

<URL:http://www.vintageaudioberlin.de/vabmenue1/vabmenue3.htm>

Of course, this was decades before Emacs.  While the concept has been
dragged through several transistorized and later digital successors, the
popularity has sharply declined and nowadays one sees this thing
mentioned much more often in accordion orchestra scores (its sole
habitat) than one actually sees it in operation.

I digress.  Seriously.

At any rate, at that time Hohner was reasonably successful promoting CUA
("could utilize accordions") for a wide spectrum of music genres.

-- 
David Kastrup