IBM Keyboard Operator’s Guide 1st Ed (Dec 1992)

[sharktastica]

So, I recently acquired this cool gem that I’ll be scanning at the earliest convenience.

Unfortunately, this document is rather non-technical, but there’s some useful info inside including details on how to use the drivers that would have came with the trackball-equipped Model M5-2 (IBM Enhanced Keyboard with 25mm Trackball for long) mentioned. If I’m not mistaken, this could be a candidate for the earliest reference of this keyboard in documents.

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If you’re interested in having scans of it, I’ll post once it’s done. Due to COVID, access to a scanner is a bit of a problem for me right now. There’s few enough pages that I could string a bunch of photos together as a stopgap.

Another thing comes to mind: I've heard it speculated that the M5-2 was introduced to reduce the complexity of the construction of the M5-1 (the 16mm trackball keyboard where the trackball and its buttons flanked the arrow keys) since that had its trackball module intersecting the membrane and was in the way of other components. Well, this IBM document from late 1992 and several months before either keyboard was in mainstream production/actually on the market, yet the M5-2 is clearly already dreamt of. Although no doubt the complexity may have been a reason the M5-1 was not in production for a large amount of time yet the M5-2 is still with us through Unicomp (although production is temporarily halted right now).

[Bjerrk]

Cool stuff!