When my keyboard arrived, a first look showed that it had this frightening problem:
- Scribble
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Someone obviously had decided to renounce the Vaterland (a popular notion amongst Germans back in the 80s when this keyboard was used), and scribble a US layout directly on the keys. There's nothing to say against the US layout, especially for a programmer,, but ... now that we won the world cup and all ...
And in fact, after a night of this and the loving use of a toothbrush and a tiny bit of toothpaste here and there,
- Kukident
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it's fortunately much better now:
- Clean
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Roll call after the cleaning (I didn't take out the space bar):
- 123
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- Roll call
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As you can see, the function keys on the left and right side of the board don't have row profiles like the alphanumerical keys, but all of them have the same profile. This is welcome because it means they could be swapped around later if needed...
The longer keys have stabilizing "feet", which is why they stand out in the previous picture.
Some of my favourite keys on this board:
- Start and Stop
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These are of course double shot keys. Strangely, there are two different designs of alpha keys on this board. On some, the mount is part of the first shot, on others it seems to be part of the second shot.
Except for the space bar, there are no keys that have real stabilizers with wire. Instead, the longer key caps only have "feet" that help stabilizing the key when pressed down on the side. Real stabilizers feel much better of course and are more effective.
- key caps upside down
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The return key even has this strange form:
- Return
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The front legends are not doubleshot, they are printed with obviously different methods for the black and white keys. On the white keys, the black front legends feel like they're carved in, while on black ones they feel like they stand out.
In any case, the key caps are really beautiful. I can imagine that they already looked kind of outdated when this keyboard was used though. The board was made on August 05, 1980 in Greenock. In 1981, the IBM PC and first Model F keyboards appeared with their cylindrical keycaps and the beige that should haunt computer design for the years to come.
- white key
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- black key
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The keyboard itself looks teethless right now:
- board wo caps
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The protective foil is brittle, but in much better shape than on my first beam spring board. I won't take it off for as long as I can afford. Mind the crud of decades in the pictures.
- foil
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- crud
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I haven't really looked much deeper yet, but it seems like mine is pretty corroded, too. We'll see.
- controller and corrosion
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- corrosion
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