deskthority

Criminy! It's an ISO BAE!

That's not all that unusual, unfortunately.

I'd adopt one of the legends or symbols from the Space Cadet keycap markings.

Nice mod! You got a "space saver" keyboard with some old-school technology.

Huh. Given the AT-style key arrangement in the main block and lack of the twinned alt keys alongside the spacebar, I'd bet it was made to look like the "standard" DEC layout, instead of IBM's "weird" AT layout, before IBM's "enhanced" 101-key keyboard jumped onto the DEC bandwagon. From the keyboard...

Make doubly-sure the ground wire between the metal chassis and case is hooked up and has a good connection. After taking one of my F/ATs apart I had a bunch of weird problems, including some manifesting as you described, which went away when I snugged down the ground wire. I have no idea why it shou...

keyboard.jpg I've had hours of entertainment playing with keyboard-layout-editor.com. This is my latest 94-key variant of the 84-key AT layout, based on the taylorswifttttt circuit board (https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=28241), an xwhatsit, and modification of the AT's lower row to acco...

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! I have a pile of old IDE cables I haven't gotten around to throwing out, too. While the question might have seemed silly to someone knowlegeable in electrical stuff, I'm at the point where "I don't know what I don't know." Coupled with a goodly dose of ...

The IBM controller is hooked to its circuit board with solid core wire. Do I need anything specific to wire the swifttttttt board to the xwhatsit, or will ordinary "hook-up wire" from eBay work?

If I remember correctly there were some other, non-keyboard forums that have been sold or shut down in recent years with the forum deleted and the site converted to a promotional site with various articles, which I would not want. VerticalScope out of Canada. Their modus operandi is to approach a f...

Heh, heh, heh...

I think I'll set this project aside a bit and concentrate on the xwhatsit conversion on the other F/AT. Sooner or later I'll find a board that will do what I want.

Ooo-kaaayyy... I got blindsided again. The old-model Orange One I bought a couple of years ago works just fine. I thought that just because the Orange Pi web site hosted various Linux distributions for the Zero 3, that they would actually work. It turns out this is not the case. The Debian image was...

Of course! It's ever so much more satisfactory than slamming your naughty bits in a desk drawer, too. Generally, once you get the thing set up, it will run forever without further attention. I set some machines up back in 2007 that are still chugging along. Of course, they're not connected to the in...

The Orange Pi customized Debian install could see the M.2 drive, but not the keyboard or mouse. After doing some web searching, I found that, for some demented reason, OP shipped some previous OS images with USB turned off in the kernel. The OP web site had a customized Arch version which I download...

The Orange Pi Zero 3 has one USB port. It sees the keyboard, mouse, and M.2 adapter just fine. However, when plugged in to the hub, it only sees the M.2 adapter. I ran into this before, with the Orange Pi One, until I found a USB hub that it liked. Ironically, the same brand as the one I'm using now...

I ordered an Orange Pi Zero 3. It cost $28. Unlike the Orange Pi One I played with a couple of years ago, it doesn't run ARMbian; it has tweaked versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, or Android. The board is about 2/3 the size of a Raspberry Pi, and all of the ports are on the same edge, which can be tu...

Back in the old days, when we filed zeroes down to make ones...

The one I'm typing on right now has .03-.05mm lateral or vertical movement. However, if I push on a top corner, I can rock it 5 or 10 degrees forward and back.

I found out that a full-size Raspberry Pi board will *just barely* fit. The Ethernet port is blocked by one of posts that holds the LED board. I did some trial fitting with a 3B+. The Pi 4 has USB OTG and the same port layout, but that's $55+shipping, and way more horsepower than I need. [twiddling ...

Alt gets prime real estate, but I might use an alt key once every two weeks, if that.

Reading a page about a guy patching DEC Ultrix to run on a small single-board computer, I came across this: "It is not a dumb keyboard. It has regions of keys, a bell, some lights, and can support differing autorepeat settings per key group." Hm. Having the cursor keys repeat faster than the charact...

Okay, I tried to buy a PocketBeagle. BeagleBoard doesn't sell them on its web site. Going price on eBay and Amazon was $65 and $59. I found them at Mouser Electronics for $35.63 plus $8 shipping. With tax, that's close to fifty bucks. I'll have to think about that for a while. I *could* just run an ...

I have hated USB in all its forms since its introduction. It's an excellent example of "standards are wonderful, there are so many to choose from!" Right after I posted about the serial adapter I found a link to a "Linux USB key fob" called a PocketBeagle, which supports USB OTG and is supposed to b...

The internal Pi idea stalled after my complete failure to get the host system to access the Pi Zero over USB. I bought another OTG cable, just in case the first one was fake or bad, and then a third, just to make sure. The host system can (usually!) tell there's a device plugged into the cable, but ...

Remember, IBM put solenoids in some keyboards because their customers complained their new keyboards weren't loud *enough*.

The worst keyboard I ever had was a BTC "foam and foil" monstrosity. It not only had zero feel, you had to watch the monitor all the time, because about ten percent of the keystrokes never registered. There was nothing to keep dust or dirt out of the foil pads; a week or two, and keys would start go...

I'm not that impressed with the curvature on my Model Fs and Ms. I think it's a relic of the typewriter days, when the "proper" position of the keyboard was much lower than modern desktops. I don't see anything wrong with a flat keyboard and flat switches. Laptops and some "compact" keyboards are fl...

typingweb10 wrote: ↑

26 Oct 2023, 18:17

I like the "switches" In the Model F AT quite a lot, unfortunately the layout leaves much to be desired (I'm still getting used to it), particularly the location of the "Esc" key.

I swapped the "Esc" and "`,~" keycaps and remapped the codes with xmodmap in Linux.

"Hopeful Seller Syndrome." Or, "Some Sucker Might Buy This." Like the $250 used Raspberry Pi 3s on eBay. Every now and then you'll see some outrageous price because the vendor ran out of something; rather than going through the hassle of deleting and recreating the listing, they just bump the price ...

When the stupid "surfboard" 101-key boards came out with the PC/AT, there was a mass migration to that layout. Real IBM PC/AT keyboards were already hard to find by the late 1980s. I bought a (used) spare circa 1989, off the old RIME For Sale echo, for $100 1989 dollars. That was a pretty good deal ...

Also some Fs and Ms will have at least a few switches that actuate a bit lower down or higher up than usual from my experience, most people probably wouldn't notice it but I guess I'm more paranoid about my keyboards than normal. Two of my 84-key Fs are like that. After swapping keys around, I dete...