Some beamspring keyboards I found today

[petermcd1010]

I had a summer internship for a hospital chain back in the '90s. They had IBM terminals in the front, connected via coax to concentrators, connected via a 56kb modem back to the datacenter, where they connected to the IBM 3090 mainframe. Each concentrator was something like an IBM 3274, which could have 32 terminals attached. So, if you think about patient entry, billing, etc., you can imagine setups like this had plenty of terminals.

For everyone whinging about the price of these, I get it. I saw another price run up in arcade games in the '90s, as people like me who grew up with arcades fell in love with bringing memories of the arcade to their homes. Arcade video game prices seem to have stabilized. Hopefully the same will happen with beamsprings. And, luckily, since the keyboards getting sold were built to last, they'll be around for a while trading hands.

I'm using a 5251 right now that I found last year on eBay for $400 and painstakingly restored and love it. The suggestions from other people here who restored beamsprings were tremendously helpful (and Chyros' videos were what inspired me!).

So, when Bass put his pictures up, I dropped my jaw and bought a non-APL one at his asking price (someone else is the lucky owner of the APL 3278 -- congrats!).

Fingers crossed more people like Bass do the dirty work of digging these beamsprings out of warehouses and putting them up for sale. They're lovely.