- DSC_0002.JPG (1.06 MiB) Viewed 2018 times
So I saw this ridiculous thing on the internets and decided I had to have it. I admire keyboards of this aesthetic very much, some of my favorites in my personal collection are my Burroughs TP110 and my Sander Associates 720 keyboard. I'd love to get my hands on a set of the Dasher keycaps, but SP always seems to be sold out of them, and I don't really have a great Cherry board to begin with, my only ones being black-switch keyboards and I like big, noisy switches with at least tactility and preferably some clicking mechanism.
At any rate, I had a kind of pang of hope when I saw the DIN-5, the kind of thing that I had learned to ignore from some of my earliest acquisitions of vintage keyboards, since as we know there's absolutely nothing saying that a DIN-5 means anything about protocol or even wiring. And in fact this is not wired the same as an XT or an AT. But I learned from research that this thing actually
was intended for a personal computer, specifically the Perkin-Elmer 7300 Professional.
- DSC_0007.JPG (1.04 MiB) Viewed 2018 times
There's a single IC inside this thing, a UV-erasable PROM (there was nothing protecting the window when I opened the case so I immediately slapped some electrician's tape over it) which is oddly sitting in some kind of socket-adapter thingy that itself looks like an old-school ceramic IC itself. I have to admit, I find myself wondering if it's possible to swap this chip for something else and change the pin assignments at one end or the other of the cable, and turn this into an AT-compatible keyboard. Failing that, where does one start going about how to build a converter? Admittedly, I may not pursue that as this has rather "Meh" Hi-Tek linears of the old "Stackpole" variety, as opposed to the later "Angry Bear" type.
