[VoIP] OT - A good clicky springy PC keyboard

[Richard Lane]

Yeah I remember those...

My first computer was a XT clone made by a company called Amstrad. It 
had a 13.something EGA monitor with a 5.25 inch single double sided 
double density drive with a whopping capacity of 360KB. It also had a 
MFM hard drive made by Seagate which had a capacity of 30 megabytes. 
When we bought this machine our family were like the people down the 
road with the huge hard drive.

The sounds were great from the old hard drives and I still have an IDE 
40MB western digital drive in my possession. I also have kept all my 
original disks and games including California games, world games, the 
sierra games (kings quest, police quest, space quest, leisure suit larry 
etc.

I only just chucked out my original Epson FX80 8 pin dot matrix printer 
last week after a clean up.

Ah the days


Mad Mark wrote:
>>      For several years now, I've been looking for a good PC keyboard that 
>> has a definite key click as you type, and just has that good old feel like 
>> the old IBM and Lexmark keyboards had. I was very disappointed to learn 
>> several years ago that Lexmark had discontinued their keyboard line. What I 
>> didn't learn then is that they sold their keyboard technology to another 
>> company called Unicomp. I just found out about Unicomp on Tuesday morning 
>> after doing a Google search, and immediately ordered one of their Customizer 
>> 104-key models, so I'd have the Windows keys. I got it this evening, and 
>> it's great! It has pretty much the same Lexmark feel I'm so used to, and not 
>> the feel of those $5.00 keyboards you get with new computers, or most of 
>> what's on the store shelves. The 101-key model costs $49.95, and the 104-key 
>> model, with the Windows keys, costs $69.95. Shipping is usually between $5 
>> and $7.50 or so, and they charge tax on orders shipped to Kentucky. Bottom 
>> line. If you're looking for a keyboard like the old IBM and/or Lexmark 
>> keyboards, and have been frustrated by all these modern-day squishy/flat 
>> keyboards, go to www.pckeyboard.com and buy one from Unicomp. The technology 
>> they use is called Buckling Spring, as opposed to the Rubber Dome technology 
>> most modern keyboards use. While shopping around for keyboards last year, I 
>> was amazed when I found a display model with some key caps missing, and 
>> underneath were just some tiny rubber things which were the equivalent of 
>> the springs in these good old keyboards! No wonder they don't feel nearly as 
>> good!
>> Jayson 
>>     
>
> I grew up on those old keyboards. The solid click that you could actually FEEL through the keyboard. I was very disappointed when we moved on to the rubber membrane keyboards. So much so that I make a program to pop the PC speaker every time a key was pressed. Still wasn't the same, though, but a little better. I remember hacking an AT-style keyboard connector onto an XT-style clickey keyboard, just so I could use it on our "modern" 286 machine... until my brother pinched it for his computer because he liked it better. :)
>
> Same with the old hard-drives. Now days hard-drives have acoustic suppression technology built into them. You're lucky to even hear them at all. Not in the old days, no siree. You KNEW when your hard-drive was doing something by the loud "CLAKA-CLAKA-CLAKA-CHUNK" they used to make. Or if you were "lucky" enough to own an even older hard-drive like we did, (I'm talking 20 MEGA-bytes here) they went "Vreeeet! Vooooort! Veeevoort! Vee, veee, vooooort!" as the stepper motor worked like crazy swinging the drive heads around. I believe I still have one of those old machines lying around somewhere... It's probably ready for a permanent home at the Smithsonian Institute by now.
>
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