newbie question

[andypeters]

I'm a complete newbie, so please forgive my question. But what is the term for the type of keyboard that has extremely glossy/smooth keys ... such as the keyboard in the photo on the Deskthority banner photo ... or this keyboard:
wiki/File:KeyTronic_1983_07_001.jpg

My vague memory of these keyboards from the late 1970s is that they were made perhaps by Honeywell or Olivetti or Digital or some other 70s-era hardware manufacturer.

Also, are there any keyboards currently made with USB cords that have these types of glossy keys?

thanks

[Chyros]

It's called shine, but it's not generally considered a desirable characteristic. Certainly not everyone dislikes it, but it's enough that manufacturers usually supply texture on keycaps. ABS tends to shine up because it wears away faster than other plastics.

[Findecanor]

Those keys are called spherical because of the dished shape of the key surface. Not all spherical keycaps are smooth, though.

Topre had its "Hi-Pro" line of very high-quality rubber dome keyboards with high spherical keys.

Signature Plastics is one of the few current manufacturers of spherical keycaps: their "SA profile", which has a smooth surface. Beware that they also have a "DSA profile" which while being spherical is not smoooth but coarsely textured.

Filco has had a model with spherical keys, specifically Signature Plastics' SA profile keys.
Filco's keys are also available as a separate key set for Cherry MX-compatible keyboards. It is available at Keyboard Co in the UK but may be found elsewhere as well.

Several runs of keysets in SA profile have been made by enthusiasts. There have been several in the marketplace section, including replicas for modern keyboards of Honeywell and Symbolics keycaps.
Some sets are also available on Pimp My Keyboard, which is run by Signature Plastics.

These key sets can be quite pricey... but that's the nature of enthusiast products made in small numbers. The Filco keyset might be the most affordable of the ones I listed.
Some people spend lots of money to trick out their cars ... others spend lots of money to trick out their keyboards.

[zslane]

From Findecanor's post you will notice a predominant name, Signature Plastics. If you become a keycap enthusiast it is a name you will see over and over. They pretty much have a monopoly on new spherical keycaps today since they are the only company with the molds and tooling to make them, and a willingness to cater to the enthusiast market.

A couple of other things to mention is that vintage spherical keycaps are invariably made of ABS plastic and have double-shot legends, as in the photo you provided. The dead giveaway is that the legends are a lighter color than the keycap shell.

Double-shotting is the process of making the letters and numbers and symbols as one piece of plastic, and the key shell another piece of plastic which are fused together to form a completed keycap. The SA family is always done this way, however DSA keysets will often be designed to use dye-sublimated legends rather than double-shotting. Because dyesub is essentially a process of printing the legends into the shell surface, the legend ink must be darker than the shell color or it won't really show up very well.

Another thing about vintage sphericals is that they typically came mounted on keyboards with curved or stepped backplates, and on switches that were angled to provide a curved, or "sculptured", arrangement so that the upper keys reached out towards your fingers, and each row was angled and positioned for optimal touch typing. Today, keyboard backplates are flat and only slightly angled, and so the SA family keycaps come in four different shapes to sort of replicate the sculptured effect previously provided by the backplate in the good old days.

That's why you will usually see custom keycap designs that use SA being described as "fully sculptured" or "flat row-3". Row 3 is the ASDF row, and is usually given keycaps with no angle on their top surface. A keyset designer can, and sometimes will, choose to design an SA set where every key on the board uses the row 3 keycap shape. This eliminates any sculpturing, but provides maximum flexibility to move keycaps around to different positions as is often necessary for international layouts and enthusiast boards with funky alternate layouts.

If you search around these forums (maybe even google would help here), you can find photos and diagrams illustrating all these concepts. The wiki section here on DT has a wealth of information that I recommend you check out as well.

[andypeters]

I think the Radio Shack TRS-80 might have also had this kind of key
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ropped.jpg

[seebart]

Welcoeme to DT andypeters!

Calling it "shine" is slightly misleading since we also have the shine on keycaps we don't want. I call it gloss. Yes andypeters vintage sphericals often were manufactured that way in the 1970s and 1980s by many companies. We have many examples here, and yes there are modern keycap sets that copy this look. These are Micro Switch (Honeywell) spherical glossy double shots for example:

keyboards-f2/micro-switch-custom-t11720 ... o%20switch

IMGP0734.JPG (920.16 KiB) Viewed 1642 times

IMGP0768.JPG (976.23 KiB) Viewed 1642 times

[zslane]

Those are so beautiful they make me weep.

[seebart]

Well they are just about the nicest sphericals I own. And yes IBM never had really beautiful ones like this even on the Beamsprings although those come close but minus the colors with few exceptions. Here is another nice example of gloss on vinatge sphericals woith HaaTa's CCCP Express 2:

29538102172_2fcaab51be_o.jpg (958.83 KiB) Viewed 1558 times

https://www.flickr.com/photos/triplehaa ... 0456/page1