1202 ALARM

Over 20 years ago, when we were first getting into PCs, my dad got a Chicony KTP-7903 keyboard in a 'goody' box from Bull Electrical. These were large cheap boxes of surplus gear and could be anything, but always had some interesting stuff in them. We even got parts of the duff Rabbit phone system in one. The keyboard was an odd-shaped thing that was supposed to be ergonomic, but it had a touchpad on the removable wrist rest which was pretty unusual. The device had a full-size 5-pin DIN PS/2 connection for the keyboard and a separate serial (RS232) connection for the touchpad. Pretty soon my dad got bored with the weird keyboard but he had the genius idea of carefully cutting the touchpad off the end of the rest and using it separately. It turned out to be really useful anywhere where a mouse was going to be hard to use. The only problem was that it had a serial connection and by about 5 years ago it was obsolete as even the older computers I use no longer had a serial port. I