HP BASIC and HTBasic both use KBD CMODE ON for Nimitz keyboard softkey compatibility. The Nimitz keyboard is used on the 9836 and has ten softkeys, the lowest of which is labeled k0. The softkey labels are displayed at the bottom of the screen in two rows, each row containing five labels and each label 14 characters wide.
The difference between HP BASIC and HTBasic’s implementation of KBD CMODE ON is that HTBasic exactly emulates the screen format for the labels, while HP BASIC uses an emulation that gives physical correspondence with the ITF 4-2-4 softkey layout.
