Today I shall discourse on the tangled history of the Meta key. Long long ago, in the dark and backwards abysm of time, there was a keyboard of exceeding beauty and complexity called the Space Cadet keyboard. It was attached to a device called the Lisp Machine, around which many arcane legends have gathered. What bears on my tale is that on the Lisp Machine, a byte was nine bits rather than the now usual eight. Thus there was the potential for the Space Cadet keyboard to ship no fewer than 512 distinct characters. To add to this plurabundance, the Space Cadet did not stop with the Shift and Control keys that were usual on the serial terminals of the time; nay, it had also Meta, Super, and Hyper keys that twiddled in their various ways the high bits of the keystroke returned to the machine. This was the origin of the Meta key. Now we must speak of Emacs, most ancient and powerful of editors, tool of wizards. One of its earliest versions ran on the Lisp Machine, and the splendiferous Space Cadet keyboard greatly influenced its interface design. This is why on the versions that run even today you often see command sequences documented as beginning with "Meta". However, the serial terminals on which most instances of Emacs actually ran in those days were not blessed with a Meta key. So the Escape key was pressed into service; and for this reason some people still pronounce Esc as "Meta". Then, in the fullness of time, there arose a second great keyboard of legend - the Model M, which after 1987 became the keyboard shipped with IBM PCs and related machines. It was said of this mighty and weighty keyboard that you could not only type with it, but use it as a rather effective bludgeon in the event of a zombie or velociraptor attack. The key layout of the Model M was primarily based on the extremely popular DEC VT220 terminal from a few years earlier. But, miraculously, in addition to the expected Esc, the Model M added one detail that harked back to the earlier Space Cadet keyboard: an Alt key. The Alt key was intended to do the same thing that Meta had - set the 8th bit of the returned character. In this way "Meta" acquired a third meaning - the Alt key. This was less confusing than it might have become because in Emacs, an Esc prefix was treated identically to the Alt modifier. So it might be said that there were *two* Meta keys. Around 1995, PC keyboards grew another modifier key. This has variously been called the Windows or Command key - but in the Unix documentation, and among those of us who remember the ancient lore, it is called "Super". Alas, it seems unlikely that the Hyper key will ever return to this fallen world.