deskthority

I'm new to posting here, but i've read a lot of the posts. So anyway, I've seen a lot of these Motorola Alphamate keyboards on eBay, and was wondering if anyone knew what type of switch they use.

Heres a link to one on eBay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Motorola-Alpha ... SwI~BbolZa

It could use Cherry MX back's as Motorola keyboards use Cherry MX blacks a lot of the time in their keyboards. Then again one of the keycaps have faded so it may not be Cherry as a lot of the time terminal keyboards with cherry switches have double shot keycaps which don't fade. It could also possibly be Foam and foil switches. In my opinion.

Not really a fan of MX blacks and I've heard that foam and foil's don't feel all that great either so I'll hold off on purchasing, I'm hoping I can find stuff locally, but I haven't had any luck so far.

off topic but who thought that arrow key placement made any sense at all

Who knows? Now you need two hands in separate corners of the keyboard. This would be interesting to try to play games on...

Depending on what the intended purpose of this was, the arrow placement might not have been so much of an issue. In many applications (eg. a command line), the functions of the horizontal and vertical arrows are almost unconnected and they won't generally be being used much at the same time.