DEC LK207

HaaTa · 15 Dec 2015, 04:23

So it's come to my attention that I've photographed over 200 keyboards

That's a lot!
I've been starting to re-upload my google albums to Flickr (because ugh Google Photos...). I won't be deleting my old accounts so the old links "should" still work. Just that it'll be more convenient to search through my albums in the future in one place.

i.e. here

But enough of that.

This is a DEC LK207, which is apparently quite rare (according to the ebay seller). I'd back that up too as I hadn't seen one before. What's even better, it's NIB

And includes some replacement keycaps.
Amusingly there's a mixture of dye subliminated and doubleshot keycaps. The keycaps themselves are a slight spherical.
The switches are a sort of leaf membrane switch that DEC often liked to use.

DSC01030

It's gooooooooold.

DSC01034

DSC01024

Flickr Album

Parjánya · 15 Dec 2015, 04:41

Such a curious disposition above... how could the cursor keys up there ever be ergonomic? : o ). I wouldn't mind having a yellow key like that!

Madhias · 15 Dec 2015, 07:41

The cursor position is indeed interesting. The gold cap is great!

terrycherry · 16 Dec 2015, 01:11

What a huge keyboard collections, Please keeping to share the rare keyboard,

HaaTa · 16 Dec 2015, 01:39

I really don't know how many I have anymore

Also, Christmas came early, just got another 50 uline boxes to continue stacking boxes of keyboards

urbancamo · 18 Dec 2015, 12:06

That's a nice find and thank you for posting such good quality photos!

In the *cough* few years I have been dealing with DEC kit I've never come across one of these before.
I would be very surprised if this isn't a rackmount version of the DEC LK201. If you measure the width I recon you'll find that it is < 19", hence the weird layout - and the very unusable cursor keys.

The leaf spring mechanism that DEC used doesn't provide the greatest of feel, although it does vary depending on when the keyboard was manufactured and possibly how much use it has had. I think the springs loosen up over time and provide a better feel. The LK2* series with leaf springs has a nicer feel than the subsequent rubber-dome LK4* series - but that clearly is just a subjective opinion.

The GOLD key was used in DEC's word processing software, first WPS-PLUS and then ALL-IN-1 (which was an office automation product that used WPS-PLUS as its' internal word-processor). See http://www.wickensonline.co.uk/retro/allin1.html for more info on how the GOLD key worked.

If you decide to sell I'd be interested - I have plenty of systems that this could plug into and get used!

Chyros · 18 Dec 2015, 12:20

Haha, those switches look fucking awful xD . The board itself looks pretty cool though, quite Olivetti-ish, actually. Nice find!

daedalus · 16 Jul 2016, 13:41

Only discovered the existence of these today, glad to see that one went to Hataa

Like the eBay seller's listing suggests, it seems like it was intended for use with Unix systems, having a layout somewhere in between the LK101...

and the LK421...