TAB character

[Stirling Olson <seo@foraker.com>]

How can I make the TAB key just enter a TAB character and never have
that TAB character turn into spaces?

While editing .java files and other files hitting the TAB key seems to
follow some indenting conventions that I don't understand and don't
prefer.  It often enters spaces and sometimes won't even let me enter a
further tab.  I just want to have a tab character entered in the buffer
when I hit TAB and when I backspace or delete a tab in the buffer I
don't want it to turn into spaces.

Right now indent-tabs-mode is t but that still doesn't seem to help
matters.  Right now I can't even use the editor because I can't figure
out how to outwit this thing so I can have tabs where I want.  I'm happy
to read documentation but I can't seem to find the right information and
don't really want to read 10 whole books just to figure out how to enter
a tab in my document so I can determine whether this editor is worth
learning...

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Best Regards,
Stirling