deskthority

Hi,

I've seen pictures of the keyboard that came with the PCjr by IBM. The first keyboard that came with it was a chiclet-style keyboard and it was seen as one of the reason the whole PCjr flopped. To save the project, IBM made an 'enhanced' keyboard that looks like it could be clicky / buckling spring and I find it sort of cute.

Wikipedia has a picture here:


Does any of the guru's here know for sure what kind of keyboard this is ? Is it buckling spring or something else ?

ciao,

J.

The stub don't say.

I don't know anything about this keyboard either. Some searching shows everyone referring to it as IBM quickly learning its lesson for the infamous chiclet PCjr board. But how? Isn't it a cheap rubber dome membrane too?

It's awful, I have one kicking around somewhere. Domes. Cheap ones at that.

I can take pics, but I'm sure there are at least 20 keyboards people would rather me take pics of first

Wait, so the replacement keyboard still sucked? Doh.

Aha, the horror of domes..

I was hoping this would be an ok-looking very much space-saving entry-level buckling spring keyboard with an interesting early wireless system, but alas.. So I think I am going to leave those currently for sale alone..

thanks,

J.

That was my first computer. The keyboard was awful. I don't think I ever remember it being not broken.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Wait, so the replacement keyboard still sucked? Doh.

Not quite as horrible as the original Chiclet keyboard.

I got the impression that the (second) PCjr keyboard was sub-par because no-one ever seems to talk about it, but is it really that shit? Is it bad even by dome membrane standards?

It's a shame really because it looks like it has some nice keycaps (dye sub?). What do the keycap stems look like?

Good thinking! They forgot to cheap out on the caps…

IBM was keenly aware how much it cost them to make keyboards. Buckling spring was revised several times (from its ancestor beam spring, to Model F, and finally Model M) to make it cheaper by compromising the design. Ultimately they gave up on it entirely, of course. But back when the PCjr was conceived, keyboards were one point of "segmentation" they could use to ensure that the "real" IBM PC was still sufficiently better.

So in a sense the PCjr keyboard was actually designed to be shit on purpose. The media outlash caught IBM by surprise, so they replaced the chiclet one, but with a Plan B from the same school of shitty reasoning.

A nice vid comparing the two keyboard versions:

AFAIK, both were rubber domes over PCB. The second one just had some vaguely sensible keycaps.