deskthority

So I saw this ridiculous thing on the internets and decided I had to have it. I admire keyboards of this aesthetic very much, some of my favorites in my personal collection are my Burroughs TP110 and my Sander Associates 720 keyboard. I'd love to get my hands on a set of the Dasher keycaps, but SP always seems to be sold out of them, and I don't really have a great Cherry board to begin with, my only ones being black-switch keyboards and I like big, noisy switches with at least tactility and preferably some clicking mechanism.

At any rate, I had a kind of pang of hope when I saw the DIN-5, the kind of thing that I had learned to ignore from some of my earliest acquisitions of vintage keyboards, since as we know there's absolutely nothing saying that a DIN-5 means anything about protocol or even wiring. And in fact this is not wired the same as an XT or an AT. But I learned from research that this thing actually was intended for a personal computer, specifically the Perkin-Elmer 7300 Professional. There's a single IC inside this thing, a UV-erasable PROM (there was nothing protecting the window when I opened the case so I immediately slapped some electrician's tape over it) which is oddly sitting in some kind of socket-adapter thingy that itself looks like an old-school ceramic IC itself. I have to admit, I find myself wondering if it's possible to swap this chip for something else and change the pin assignments at one end or the other of the cable, and turn this into an AT-compatible keyboard. Failing that, where does one start going about how to build a converter? Admittedly, I may not pursue that as this has rather "Meh" Hi-Tek linears of the old "Stackpole" variety, as opposed to the later "Angry Bear" type.

If you didn't removed the tape for a long time and it was inside your house without sunlight, should be still working fine, but I don't think someone did a protocol converter for this piece of beast.
As far as I know, you can make the layout here:
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/
And then copy the rows and columns of your keyboard here:
https://kbfirmware.com
After you finished with this, select your type of controller and configure the pins of your board. It's a little bit scary, but not too hard. Anyway I recomend you search a little bit more, I'm not an expert.

Thats a very old design for piggyback chips to save space on a board.

So that epronm prob connects to the chip underneath thats a controll IC or similar.

Think of it like the retro equivlilent of stacking ram ontop of an SoC

It looks a lot like this picture on Wikipedia of similarly set of piggy-backed chips. TIL.

JBert wrote: It looks a lot like this picture on Wikipedia of similarly set of piggy-backed chips. TIL.

A whole hell of a lot! I wonder if that's another keyboard controller in the Wikipedia picture...

PlacaFromHell wrote: If you didn't removed the tape for a long time and it was inside your house without sunlight, should be still working fine, but I don't think someone did a protocol converter for this piece of beast.
As far as I know, you can make the layout here:
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/
And then copy the rows and columns of your keyboard here:
https://kbfirmware.com
After you finished with this, select your type of controller and configure the pins of your board. It's a little bit scary, but not too hard. Anyway I recomend you search a little bit more, I'm not an expert.

I put the tape on. It was without tape when I first cracked the case, so unless someone left it to sit open under some source of UV rays for some time, it's probably not erased. I didn't realize there were tools already for this operation, I will have to see where they lead. I was expecting to have to borrow my boss's EEPROM tools to dump this one, send the contents off to someone who can make sense of it, and have them send me back a file to burn to a PROM! Thanks!

My guess is also that the top chip = EPROM, and below that a "CPU".
I once took apart an HP keyboard and found an Intel 8251 controller. Dumped and disassembled the code, and re-wrote it into an EPROM version. This about 1980. Very simple code to understand, as I recall.