Keyboards

Posted on January 02, 2003 @ 11:58 in General

Remember those old IBM keyboards? They weigh a ton because they have a solid steel backplate and when hitting a key it travels a satisfying distance before ending its journey with a solid *click*. The quality of typing on those keyboards has never been equalled IMHO. But they're getting hard to find nowadays and they're old AT style keyboards mostly, with big old AT style plugs and missing those special windows keys between the CRTL and ALT keys (mostly superfluous, but I can't do without the windows-key+E shortcut anymore).

So what do you do when your old and trusted keyboard dies? Martin (who had an old NCR keyboard, which I recon is similar to the old IBMs) got a new keyboard:

I just want a keyboard, dammit! With qwerty keys so I can type words. I don't want it to take up half of my desk with widgets that start up my mailer, fast-forward music, and just about everything short of making a tasty cheese sandwich.

He seems happy enough with his new Microsoft Internet Keyboard, but I really need to take this opportunity to extoll the virtues of the Dell AT101W keyboard. While it isn't as solid as the old IBM keyboards and hasn't as satisfying a click, it's the best 'new' keyboard I've found. It's a plain keyboard, no extra bells and whistles, just the keys you expect. They travel with just the right resistance to their endpoint where they click just right. It's nice and heavy and doesn't slip and slide around, even though it doesn't have the solid steel backplate. I got mine about 2 years ago direct from Dell, but I now see they can be had for as little as 15 euro, or about 25% what I paid Dell for it. Highly recommended.

Of course, if even the old IBM keyboards are still too newfangled for you, you can always wire up a Smith-Corona typewriter and use that to type your blog entries (via Slashdot).

Comments and Trackbacks

  1. The "old-style" keyboard I remember most fondly is the one that came with my Commodore 286/16 AT. Long after the machine had gone, I still used the keyboard with my subsequent P155 and P266 machines, until it finally gave up the ghost (or more specifically, the backspace and RShift keys).
    BTW, your link to the Corona typewriter yields a 403 (Forbidden).

    Posted by Arjan on January 06, 2003 @ 09:52

  2. Darnit, they went and changed the URL. It's fixed again :-)

    Posted by Frank on January 07, 2003 @ 10:44

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