deskthority

I have literally never encountered that criticism. :) More often, I read reviews such as this one that describes the original IBM Model Ms as "built like a tank". I suppose everything is relative. The Model F feels virtually indestructible. Maybe the Model M has changed over the years. The defect I...

I hope you guys are taking the piss. :lol: I think some of the words chosen are a bit strong. It is also the case that whatever you do, you won't please everyone. Ever tried to buy a beamspring? Or typed on a Model F? These aren’t mainstream nor are they shy of four figure price tags. There is also...

One keyboard is not objectively better than another - it's subjective. People have preferences and there is nothing wrong with that and there is really no reason to care if the majority of the PC industry is aligned to your own preferences or not, as long as you can find something you like.

This relates to an experience I had with my Model F XT and a converter based on a Teensy. It was connected to a KVM switch which was in turn connected to two PCs. It had been working fine for some time but one day, when I turned on of the PCs off, it started to play up with the other one - random ch...

Yes, the converter is inside the moulding of the USB A plug. Here are some pictures: Coeus, I just sent you a PM but can I buy one or two of those PCBs from you? ...or can you provide the gerbers? I'm not looking to sell them but just build one or two for myself. Thanks! The PCB in the picture is p...

Earlier today, I noticed a small piece of lettuce between the keys of my IBM MOdel F XT keyboard. I held the KB upside down and shook to get it to fall out, which it did, but then afterwards I found the P key had stopped working. Removing the keycap I could wiggle the spring to make it work but it w...

Doom was significant in making the PC a gaming computer , for the masses. Before this, the PC had been seen as only a machine for the office. So was the spread of PCs into the home market behind AOL starting to offer access to the Internet in the early 1990s? Perhaps, after that, Internet access al...

I am not sure how relevant this is, but when talking about the point where the sales from clone manufacturers overtook those from IBM, by talking about proportions, it is natural to think of IBM's sales shrinking and the clone manufacturer's sales increasing but, at the beginning, I suspect this was...

I'm sure he was referring to when they were new. However, go find an F77 or kishsaver nowadays and see how much you'd spend to get one, if you can find one. I don't think comparing an F XT is a valid comparision, as these boards are reproductions of those 4704 Model F's Maybe the F77 or kishsaver a...

Elsewhere on the Web I found a Trello card implying that the "Soarer" who made these has disappeared and the IP status of his converters is murky. But that was dated some years back. If you're interested in the legality of taking his code and making a converter from it, it would obviously depend on...

Hence why I said TMK as a Soarer's alternative and mapping matrix (thus bypassing original controller and protocol) to use QMK. Never said to use QMK as converter firmware (although a friend of mine is working on porting TMK converters to QMK for the easier macros, among other things). I did try th...

1. Yes, but I would never buy a prebuilt one as they are overpriced trash. You can build one yourself in 5 minutes for a quarter of the price. Some people see value is a neat thing that has been professionally assembled. Yes, it may be sold for rather more than the cost of the parts but isn't that ...

The new Model Fs are incredible value for what they are, they're cheaper than the Fs of yore even before you adjust for inflation. Just because overengineered 80's tech was considered junk for a while doesn't mean it wasn't expensive to make. I assume you mean compared to an original Model F when i...

Some light on the keyboard can be helpful indeed! I only have RGB on my ZSA boards so I went a little different route to help with my vintage boards because I prefer to keep my office relatively dim overall with bright light right where I need it. I have an IBM Model F XT and I find the KB being wh...

What I would love is a good way for keyboards to send Unicode directly to the computers they connect to rather than just keycodes.... The X Window System (X11) sends key events to applications both a keycode (to identify which physical key was pressed) and a translation, i.e. if the context within ...

You can get very close to a standard ANSI layout. https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=48786.msg1048948#msg1048948 Yes, the 122 key terminal keyboard is close but the model F version is not common and those that are around are much more expensive than the recreated model F. The Model M version of t...

Aren't those two completely different systems for signal creation? One is based on the change on capacitance due to the hammer connecting two contact plates on the PCB and the other one on closing a circuit between conductive parts on the membrane. That probably means, the electronic circuits on bo...

In the case of the stock photo you don't know the colour of the light illuminating it, how the camera was handling white balance or whether someone has fiddled with the colours in photo-shop afterwards. The colour of the light does make a big difference too - in any whitish light there will be a spe...

...I think the ABS spacebar color matches the PBT keycaps, so that's good, but I didn't trust my memory enough to tell if the retr0brighted case looked close to original or not.... If the PBT keycaps are all the others than the spacebar then I am not sure I agree. The spacebar looks a purer white a...

cakeanalytics wrote: ↑

03 Dec 2020, 18:47

Now imagine an office full of them.

I wonder how many people now have hearing defects or tinitus as a result.

This is the photo I refer to in my previous post.

I opened the larger version in evince and it is working fine for me. I did notice that the first photo in the "Photos of Brand New Models" looks quite distorted - the the one that says it is just a placeholder. Note that the front edge appears to be curved when I assume it is straight and whole keyb...

That's interesting. Though I have not done it myself I know it is possible to design a PCB and then have that design made up. Is the same true of a metal plate? I assume a case would be the most difficult part as most cases are moulded and making the moulds has a lot of set-up cost.

Pull up is different on clock in the keyboard because if you look closely, clock is going to INT and DB5, while data only goes to DB6. It looks like DB5 and DB6 are being used as outputs here. The open collector buffers in IC2 are drawn so the signal goes through them as if they are an arrow, i.e. ...

Interesting, you have an 8049, mine has an 8749. Generally the same but mine is technically erasable and reprogrammable. Maybe they are slightly different in their high/low thresholds? I assume you're basing that on the fact that mine is in a plastic package because I can't read a part number on it...

This might be interesting too: http://www.kbdbabel.org/schematic/kbdba ... pc_kbd.pdf

Here are some pics: the second one is just a crop of the first by focuses in on what I think may be the circuit driving the cable. It's hard to tell because am unable to decode the chip numbers.

Inxie wrote: ↑

15 Sep 2020, 20:25

Wait what? Mine just read meg ohms.

If they are enabled in software then presumably they are not actually resistors at all but transistors used to behave a like a resistor and are only turned on when power is applied.

Adding those two 1K resistors caused it to stop working altogether. Of note, there was already about 2K resistance between +5V and the clock and data lines while unplugged without any modifications... Where did you measure this? At the keyboard, unconnected to the MCU? I had not considered the KB a...

...Luckily the eBay one for mine did have the shield connected properly so that wasn't it. It turns out my orihalcon does have the shield connected. To my naked eye it appeared to go to a pad that was otherwise n/c but looking at the photos I can see it goes via a plated through hole to a narrow tr...