syntax#1

90
1978 Lightpen UI
Famed for the green screen,
but many failed to notice
the pen on the side.
The lightpen was (like
everything else) custom
designed and created
for the Fairlight and
allowed the user to
control things by
touching the screen.
This even allowed you
to directly 'draw'
waveforms and
harmonic profiles.
Series III revisions
allowed you to connect
a mouse (if desired) and
the lightpen was
removed to an
integrated keyboard/tablet design in
1983!
Is your screen damaged? Replacement
screens have a special coating and
were manufactured by Philips in the
USA for the US special air-force in the
late 90s. So keeping a Fairlight alive
can be an expensive business!
Speaking of the keyboard, the Fairlight was really
controlled through this and not the alternate input
do-hickies. Looking at the UI the top line has a
Command: and pressing escape would bring up a
cursor ready to accept input from you. Hence owning
a Fairlight meant either learning a lot of interesting
and arcane commands (PP or L,2 or LP,1,127 anyone?)
or having an engineer who know all of this by heart.
You could always use the manual, the Fairlight came
with several of those, each multi-hundred page
behemoths covering everything in incredible detail.
And did I mention there was a CPU lurking in there
too? Well there is...