Erik,

I don't know if console input bindery is as you suspect, but the flexibility
you suggest is right-on.

Like the Mac, this is how W98 does it, too.  

-Mike


On Fri, 14 May 1999, Erik E. Fair wrote:

> We are now dealing with console input devices from multi-device busses
> (e.g. USB) a bit more often than we used to, and we seem to bind tightly to
> particular devices; perhaps a bit too tightly. I wonder if we shouldn't
> take a page from Apple Computer's handling of such things with the Apple
> Desktop Bus (ADB), which USB is replacing on the iMac and new Blue & White
> G3 desktop machine (and will probably appear more often in the IBM PC clone
> space, too); MacOS doesn't bother to designate any particular input device
> as "console" or "primary" - it just takes keystrokes and pointer-movements
> from *all* devices on the bus.
> 
> Yes, that means two keyboards can "fight" with each other. However, it also
> means that you can hot-swap on USB and not care, and you can have two
> devices that operate in a complementary fashion, e.g. a keyboard and a
> bar-code scanner that sends input as if it were keystrokes, or a mouse and
> a track-ball (or touch-pad).
> 
> Or am I misreading the state of console input bindery in NetBSD?
> 
> 	Erik
>