Noise or other glitches may cause the keyboard to get out of sync with the computer. This means that the keyboard is finished transmitting a code, but the computer is somewhere in the middle of receiving it. If this happens, the keyboard will not receive its handshake pulse at the end of its transmission. If the handshake pulse does not arrive within 143 ms of the last clock of the transmission, the keyboard will assume that the computer is still waiting for the rest of the transmission and is therefore out of sync. The keyboard will then attempt to restore sync by going into "resync mode." In this mode, the keyboard clocks out a 1 and waits for a handshake pulse. If none arrives within 143 ms, it clocks out another 1 and waits again. This process will continue until a handshake pulse arrives. Once sync is restored, the keyboard will have clocked a garbage character into the computer. That is why the key-up/key-down flag is always transmitted last. Since the keyboard clocks out 1's to restore sync, the garbage character thus transmitted will appear as a key release, which is less dangerous than a key hit. Whenever the keyboard detects that it has lost sync, it will assume that the computer failed to receive the keycode that it had been trying to transmit. Since the computer is unable to detect lost sync, it is the keyboard's responsibility to inform the computer of the disaster. It does this by transmitting a "lost sync" code (value $F9 = 11111001) to the computer. Then it retransmits the code that had been garbled. About Lost Sync. ---------------- The only reason to transmit the "lost sync" code to the computer is to alert the software that something may be screwed up. The "lost sync" code does not help the recovery process, because the garbage key code can't be deleted, and the correct key code could simply be retransmitted without telling the computer that there was an error in the previous one.