deskthority

I couple of years ago they weren't willing to do four characters on keycaps. They told me it was because their smallest font size was too large to make it practical.

Looks like they've made a process change along the way. Good!

This image is from the article "Restoring a ZX Spectrum+ Toastrack at https://celso.io/posts/2025/06/28/toastrack/

It was a membrane keyboard; the article has photos of the internals. The Spectrum's operating system was BASIC, as was common on many 8-bit machines. The printing on the D-shaped keys ...

My *guess* would be, since the stems are normally a hidden part, the various manufacturers figure it doesn't matter what color they are. If it was me, I'd make runs of stems with the left-over plastic from other jobs, as many leftovers as it takes to fill the molder's hopper.

When selling them, I'd ...

Pretty, pretty, pretty...

Every time I've taken an F apart, some of the keys didn't work when I put it back together. It usually took two or three tries for all the keys to work.

I'm pretty sure IBM did all the assembly and testing by hand, judging from the initialed labels on some boards. That would explain why an F/AT ...

I've been using a Model F keyboard since 1987. I'm not sure if it's the same one since I have a couple of spares.

I one of those "test kits" with a piece of Plexiglas and nine Cherry MX switches of different types. I can't tell the difference between any of them. I've been ruined for ordinary ...

A normal PC-XT Model F has 1u striking surfaces on all keys, even when they're 1.75 or 3u.

Only the keypad '+' key is like that on this board. The rest of the keys have tops the same as their bottoms. And I've never seen a beveled Enter key like that.

Is this an example of one of those "stick on ...

The wire stabilized keys move more freely than the barrel stabilized ones, particularly if struck on an edge.

I had enough parts keyboards to switch all my main boards to wire stabilized.

I've never seen elliptical keycaps before! I think I like them.

Actually, older (some 1920s-1930s) Cadillacs had pinstriping. So did some European luxury cars. All done by hand.

You would just want some tasteful accent lines, not a full Himsl or Roth hot rod style.

Black with gold pinstriping.

With a little practice on pieces of scrap metal, it's easier to do freehand pinstriping than you might think.

You can also get gold transfer letters for that Simplex style.

I've used the same IBM Model F keyboard for forty years. Despite discrete mechanical bits flapping around under the keycaps, it still works just fine.

Looks like the Compaq laptop and docking station I was issued by an employer in 1995. It was weird enough it would only boot special Compaq Windows 3.1. Had a mushy rubber dome keyboard of some sort. And, after all these years, I remember the laptop was soooo sloooowww... and then it would "go to ...

Forum glitch; dupe.

Believe it or not, a lot of the computer stuff (anything "high tech", basically) in a lot of those old shows were... cardboard. There were companies that supplied them to dress sets. Most of them are in the real estate industry now, providing cardboard models of home furnishings to dress empty ...

The Commodore PET had a trapezoidal display very similar to that one, but from looking at some PET pictures, it's definitely not a PET.

Surfing through Google Images I found quite a few trapezoidal terminals, but they were all one-piece units with integral keyboards. No joy from Yandex Images ...

Cool. Thanks!

I'm surprised the widescreen CRTs weren't a big thing. [pause] Come to think of it, they might have been, just turned 90 degrees and used in portrait mode.

Univac.png

I found this on the web the other day. It's a terminal for a Sperry-Rand UNIVAC from the 1960s.

Note the two-layer keycaps, the cursor keys on the left, the left-arrow key where Tab would normally be, the right arrow on the space bar, the other right-arrow to the right, with the Tab ...

I've had similar issues with real vintage IBM keyboards and their springs. Sometimes getting all the keys to work takes several assemblies and a bit of tweaking with a toothpick.

That is *deeply* weird, particularly the sculpting of the top and bottom row keycaps.

It definitely looks like some sort of terminal. I'm surprised they would use foam-and-foil switches, though. My experience with those has been very bad; it's odd they would be used in a bespoke and expensive ...

Unicomp has the button plates - they call them "frames" - in original 101-key and later 103 or 105 key versions.

They were $24.95 not long ago. They're $29 plus shipping just now. I have a spare M with the frame split into three pieces; I guess I should have bought a replacement earlier.

Some ...

Label says Clone Turbo PC. At least they're pretty straight forward with admitting they're a clone!


I *think* I remember a company with that name advertising in Computer Shopper (the US one) back in the 1980s. That was back when not all machines were completely IBM-compatible, usually due to ...

That's probably the strangest keyboard I ever saw, with Control, Alt, and Backspace up where the missing function keys would go, the mystery pad, and the XT-size full length spacebar.

The divot over the mystery pad looks like it might have been intended for a trackball, but there aren't any ...

There you go, putting greasy thumbprints on my rose-colored glasses...

nac5605 wrote: 16 Sep 2024, 19:40 There is the slight oddity of a 2u escape key at the top left

Hardly odd, since the 1u escape key on a standard IBM 84-key AT keyboard is on the right, in the cursor block.

Interesting layout. Just a standard keyboard with the alpha block split and re-clocked. Most manufacturers seem to go for weirdball styling or oddball key placements as well as the ergo split.

The space bar has three switches under it. I was expecting a stabilizer bar but it's just three switches, one in the middle and one at either end.


I'm by no means as expert as many on the forum, but I've never seen that before. Stabilizers are way cheaper than switches, and electrical engineers ...

I love the key layout. The extra keys would be handy, particularly if you were into remapping layouts for efficiency.

The web says there have been Wyse-to-USB adapters to allow them to be used on a PC. xx's link says it takes Cherry keycaps if you want to change them.

Televideo 995-65, according to the Reddit thread the picture is from. But you probably knew that already.

Interesting variant of the DEC layout. Separate Line Feed and Return keys, 20 function keys, 4 PF keys,
separate Backspace and Delete keys, Control key on middle row (and offset to the left ...

Interesting! Do you have any pictures you can post here, or is there just the youtube thing?