Historical question - when did rubber domes eat the world?

esr

23 May 2021, 16:18

Hak Foo wrote:
23 May 2021, 10:49
The fact that IBM were selling mechanical boards into the 1990s was therefore not that relevant; Northgate ended up as a brand defined by their keyboards more than their PCs, and Dell was pushing mechanical boards past the debut of Windows 95.
As Admiral Shark pointed out, IBM didn't entirely stop shipping mechanicals until 1999.

I don't see how you can dismiss this as irrelevant. My original question is "when did rubber domes eat the world?" and I have since tried to refine that to when the transition became irreversible. And capacity planners at IBM clearly still thought there was a market for buckling springs for about a decade after 1987.

I think we can only support an irreversibility date that early by supposing that they were spectacularly incompetent at market projection. Which is a stretch too far for me.

Hak Foo

23 May 2021, 23:12

esr wrote:
23 May 2021, 16:18
I don't see how you can dismiss this as irrelevant. My original question is "when did rubber domes eat the world?" and I have since tried to refine that to when the transition became irreversible. And capacity planners at IBM clearly still thought there was a market for buckling springs for about a decade after 1987.
It's more that by the mid 1990s, "IBM is doing blah" is no longer a solid argument to conclude "the industry as a whole is doing blah".

We know IBM and Dell were late holdouts for selling mechanical keyboards with their PCs. We also know they were relatively premium brands at the time, where there was both a higher margin and a bit of an expectation of higher fit and finish than "Wally's Bucket-o-PC" down the street. I believe the real answer of when the rubber dome took over comes from asking all the long gone Wallys.

The 1987 date is more about when "what IBM is doing" begins to cease being a good proxy for the entire industry. As time goes on, their predictive power drops quickly.

An interesting comparison: remember when PC cases often had LED displays for the CPU clock speed? That was a trend that disappeared on a similar timeframe to mechanical keyboards. You had some manufacturers who never used them, some who kept supplying it until 1998 or 1999 or so, but most of them started to disappear around the time that Pentium-class CPUs became dominant. (You saw a few with 1xx LED panels, but full three-digit was pretty scarce, and the only four digit one I ever saw was something I soldered myself). You'd probably have to take a broad slice of the market to decide exactly when the trend faded, rather than looking at the behaviour of a handful of manufacturers.

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sharktastica

23 May 2021, 23:17

Perhaps uniquely in IBM's case, the fact they were still making terminal and terminal emulator Model Ms (and even introducing new ones such as various terminal M2s) throughout the '90s for companies still happy to fork out more for higher-quality products/remain in IBM's ecosystem, it made sense to also continue some consumer/prosumer Ms in production as well? Economies of scale on the springs/hammers and perhaps some other components, making the most out of the workforce and machinery already making Ms, etc.

esr

26 May 2021, 20:32

This morning I ran across a deep dive into the Selectric typewriter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJITkKaO0qA

I learned two things from it:

(1) After the Selectric was released in 1961, IBM swiftly captured 75% of the typewriter market. This certainly matches my memories of the 1980s and early 1990s - even after the Selectric was EOLed in 1984 Selectrics remained de rigeur for any office that didn't want to look hopelessly antiquated, until they were replaced by word-processing computers.

(2) Compared to a conventional key/platen typewriter, a Selectric is very loud. Compared to a Model M it's ludicrously you've-got-to-be-kidding-me loud. I'd forgotten that part, but chyrosran22 compares them side by side.

Thar comparison pretty much disposes of any theory that office customers valued quiet in any significant way. Had that been true, the Selectric could never had displaced key/platen typewriters as it manifestly did.

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hellothere

26 May 2021, 21:05

> There's probably also some interesting trends in the market for replacement keyboards at this time. As PCs became a home consumer thing, it wasn't "call IT and they'll get a like replacement on a service contract" anymore. It was "I spilled a soda into my keyboard, I'm going to go to CompUSA and buy whatever is cheapest so I can finish my game of Doom."
.
You do have an interesting point in that comment, Hak Foo. Maybe computer gaming, mainly by the under-20 crowd, drove some of the switch to rubber dome/membrane. You could hop on your bike, ride down to CompUSA, and get one of those $10 KBs. Hey, they might even have a return that was missing a key or a foot and you could buy that for even more maximum cheapness.

Doom did come out in 1993. I do remember that as a big thing in the computer world.
Last edited by hellothere on 26 May 2021, 21:10, edited 1 time in total.

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Muirium
µ

26 May 2021, 21:09

I played Doom quite a bit in the early mid nineties. Never did wreck a keyboard from it. But then I always drank my Irn-Bru straight from the bottle, like a sir.
Spoiler:

keyboard Kultist

27 May 2021, 05:04

Mmmmm Doom. When I came to my present job back in the early 1990s I and a much more senior faculty member got into Doom. Good times.

Recently I got one of the free Doom variants and it's still great fun. I've been playing it using an Acer kb101A :-)

Findecanor

27 May 2021, 11:56

Doom was significant in making the PC a gaming computer, for the masses. Before this, the PC had been seen as only a machine for the office.
It hastened the end of the "home computer" platforms. Another significant change was Windows 95 - the first major OS for the IBM PC that didn't look like a kludge.

The game caused chaos in the computer halls at my high school. I once got kicked out of class for playing it - but which I wasn't actually doing: I was looking for graphics artefacts, in order to figure out how the graphics worked... The game reinforced my interest in 3D graphics and game programming, which led to my first programming job some years later.

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ifohancroft

27 May 2021, 17:52

esr wrote:
17 May 2021, 14:33
What I'd really like to get my lunch hooks on is a prototype made from the Hall Effect beam-spring switches Kono has been talking up for a couple of years.
I don't know if someone else has offered already, as I hve not caught up with the thread yet, but:

I have pre-ordered a batch of 110 (I think) as well as the Keystone keyboard that will support them, in TKL. I have promised to trade 22 (I think) to manisteinn, so I'll have a couple left that I'll gladly send you.

esr

27 May 2021, 18:40

[quote=ifohancroft post_id=487426 time=1622130732 user_id=1260
I have pre-ordered a batch of 110 (I think) as well as the Keystone keyboard that will support them, in TKL. I have promised to trade 22 (I think) to manisteinn, so I'll have a couple left that I'll gladly send you.
[/quote]

If you can actually get your hands on a prototype keyboard, I'd love that but I'm not the person who should have hands on it first. That would be my friend Wendell Wilson, because he and I are about to film a YT documentary about the history of buckling- and beam-spring switches.

If you're talking a keyboard rather than loose switches, or even just parts that can be assembled into one, let me know and I'll pass you his address. And my most since gratitude - being able to bracket the documentary woth IBM 3278 beam springs on one and an a new beam-spring board on the other would be killer.

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ifohancroft

27 May 2021, 18:52

esr wrote:
27 May 2021, 18:40
[quote=ifohancroft post_id=487426 time=1622130732 user_id=1260
I have pre-ordered a batch of 110 (I think) as well as the Keystone keyboard that will support them, in TKL. I have promised to trade 22 (I think) to manisteinn, so I'll have a couple left that I'll gladly send you.
If you can actually get your hands on a prototype keyboard, I'd love that but I'm not the person who should have hands on it first. That would be my friend Wendell Wilson, because he and I are about to film a YT documentary about the history of buckling- and beam-spring switches.

If you're talking a keyboard rather than loose switches, or even just parts that can be assembled into one, let me know and I'll pass you his address. And my most since gratitude - being able to bracket the documentary woth IBM 3278 beam springs on one and an a new beam-spring board on the other would be killer.
[/quote]

I don't know if it would be considered a prototype since I am waiting for production units to ship in-order for me to receive mine, so it would be first production batch.

I was talking loose switches (I didn't understand you wanted a keyboard and thought you were talking about the switches), however, I wouldn't mind lending my keyboard for the documentary if it works for you since it's not exactly a prototype, but I would like to get it back after.

esr

27 May 2021, 19:57

ifohancroft wrote:
27 May 2021, 18:52
I was talking loose switches (I didn't understand you wanted a keyboard and thought you were talking about the switches), however, I wouldn't mind lending my keyboard for the documentary if it works for you since it's not exactly a prototype, but I would like to get it back after.
Of course.

I'll talk to Wendell. Don't want to be making committmenmts on his behalf without checking.

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ifohancroft

27 May 2021, 20:41

esr wrote:
27 May 2021, 19:57
ifohancroft wrote:
27 May 2021, 18:52
I was talking loose switches (I didn't understand you wanted a keyboard and thought you were talking about the switches), however, I wouldn't mind lending my keyboard for the documentary if it works for you since it's not exactly a prototype, but I would like to get it back after.
Of course.

I'll talk to Wendell. Don't want to be making committmenmts on his behalf without checking.
Sure

Coeus

28 May 2021, 18:57

I am not sure how relevant this is, but when talking about the point where the sales from clone manufacturers overtook those from IBM, by talking about proportions, it is natural to think of IBM's sales shrinking and the clone manufacturer's sales increasing but, at the beginning, I suspect this was not true at all - instead the clone manufacturers were offering a cheaper product to people who would never had bought the IBM original - they would simply not had any kind of PC. In other words they were expanding the market.

When I did work experience in 1984/1985 it was at the offices of a telco where there were IBM terminals on many of the desks, an IBM minicomputer used for software development and a whole floor IBM mainframe used for customer billing. I reckon a couple of hundred people were employed in that building. There were exactly two IBM PCs - one on the desk of the mainframe sysadmin and one in shared use for a few specialist applications that were available for the PC.

Later in 1985, joining the research division of the same telco, IBM PCs were still unusual. The general view was that they were too expensive to have one per desk and at the same time not remotely powerful enough for serious computing. Mainframes were still used for payroll, billing, customer records, fault tickets, and various other things. Unix workstations and VAX minicomputers were used for number crunching in various kinds of research and, once we had them, were also used for general purpose computing. Offices were not remotely paperless, though the research centre had an internal e-mail system based on DEC All-in-one and many of the Unix workstations had access to Internet e-mail.

My impression of when this really changed was around 1990 and, checking the Intel processor history, this was just after the introduction of 486 processor. Certainly my memory of the 386-based machines was that they were generally big and heavy, even from the clone manufacturers. The 486-based machine were smaller, lighter and, I suspect, cheaper. Very soon they were one per desk.

On the question of noise, during that five year period from 1985 to 1990 small, shared offices were the norm, i.e. with around 4-6 people in a shared space, obviously with a desk each, with the exception of senior managers who had individual offices. Open plan had not really taken off within this organisation. That came later, after the spread of the PC-clone.

Coeus

28 May 2021, 19:28

Findecanor wrote:
27 May 2021, 11:56
Doom was significant in making the PC a gaming computer, for the masses. Before this, the PC had been seen as only a machine for the office.
So was the spread of PCs into the home market behind AOL starting to offer access to the Internet in the early 1990s? Perhaps, after that, Internet access also became a driver of PC sales.
Findecanor wrote:
27 May 2021, 11:56
...Another significant change was Windows 95 - the first major OS for the IBM PC that didn't look like a kludge.
I think look is very apt. I know there was a lot of effort put into making it look slick and install smoothly but to my mind, running a multi-tasking environment over the top of a single-tasking core (MS-DOS) was still a bodge. Windows NT was much more stable but bad for gaming. To my mind Windows XP was a big step forward in a way that I don't think any version of Windows since has been.

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hellothere

28 May 2021, 20:35

Muirium wrote:
26 May 2021, 21:09
But then I always drank my Irn-Bru straight from the bottle, like a sir.
Spoiler:
That was one of the more interesting Internet tours I've taken in a long time.

davkol

29 May 2021, 20:38

Coeus wrote:
28 May 2021, 18:57
I am not sure how relevant this is, but when talking about the point where the sales from clone manufacturers overtook those from IBM, by talking about proportions, it is natural to think of IBM's sales shrinking and the clone manufacturer's sales increasing but, at the beginning, I suspect this was not true at all - instead the clone manufacturers were offering a cheaper product to people who would never had bought the IBM original - they would simply not had any kind of PC. In other words they were expanding the market.
This.

For a thread with "the world" in its title, it's been remarkably US-centric, perhaps with a hint of western Europe. Coming from the former Eastern Bloc, IBM obviously wasn't a thing here; local boomers feel nostalgic about Tesla Hall-effects instead. In the 90s, low cost was crucial, thus ruling out the likes of IBM PC for the majority. And that was still in the Global North.

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Muirium
µ

29 May 2021, 20:49

Very good point.

So, when did rubberdomes infiltrate the east? Were they among the many dubious fruits of perestroika? Forget your kvass and Tesla, here’s your Coke and spongey membrane keyboards to spill it on!

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