This is an industrial keyboard from around 1983 manufactured by Honeywell. It features an extremely rare tall stem variant of the Microswitch SC series switches. They're clicky tactile and utilize a capacitive sense system similar to the IBM Beamspring or Model F. The tactility is achieved with a spring over buckling plate setup similar to Alps SKCP.
Everything about the board is brutally industrial. Caps are thick, case is thick, cable is thick, etc. It should easily survive a nuclear winter without missing a keystroke.
I'm only aware of one other of these in existence. It seems to be in a museum and displayed alongside its original system (which I sadly don't have). https://all-andorra.com/modicon-584-hmi/
Fortunately this board shares some similarities with other Honeywell boards made around this time. Although none of them use tall stem SC switches, they shared a protocol so a QMK port from MMcM worked with barely any modification.
Case is 5-10mm thick cast aluminum
"Engineering Keyboard Prototype"
Backing and capacitive membrane removed
Buckling plate (think hair barette)
Anemic port in comparison to the original
The conversion to USB/QMK is reversible should I ever come across an OG system.
This is my IBM 4979 terminal. It's part of the IBM Series/1 minicomputer ecosystem which launched in 1976 although my terminal was made 1979 or 1980. It features a 66 key IBM beamspring that was unfortunately suffering from the usual material degradation. The CRT was also non-functional with an apparent HV issue.
The terminal was available in a number of different languages with many of them having extra keys for an extended alphabet. Mine being a boring US English model had several blank caps with blockers underneath the switch to prevent actuation. Fortunately the blockers can be removed and the switches are fully functional.
I went about the cleaning and rebuild as normal for a beamspring.
Plastic degradation with glass fiber exposed
I won't go into too much detail about troubleshooting and repairing the CRT unless anyone asks. Short story is that some resistors didn't age well. Some fresh modern ones and it's good to go.
The protocol is a pretty basic parallel bus with a secretarial caps lock handled by the keyboard logic. I was able to whip up some QMK code and a converter to speak to it.
Absolutely no modifications were made to the terminal other than cleaning, repairing, and replacing aged materials with archival grade equivalents. Conversion was done entirely with a plug and play connector that interfaces with the terminal as if it were a real Series/1.
Right now it's plugged into a Raspberry Pi, boots up to a login prompt, and works perfectly! This is without a doubt the best way to experience a text adventure game if you ask me.
This is my Nixdorf 8850 keyboard which came out in the mid 1970s (although I think mine is a later 80s version). It dates from an era where computer design was still the wild west. There were no standard or correct ways to do anything so every manufacturer made it up as they went along. This keyboard is an excellent example of siloed design. Absolutely every aspect of it is complete bonkers and over-engineered to the extreme.
It was in quite good condition aside from the grime. I gave it a thorough inside and out cleaning along with a light sous-vide retro-bright just to take the edge off of the yellowing.
It features the real OG Nixie switch, none of that Cherry stuff. The switch sensing is done via inductive coupling. Each stem contains a magnet which changes the saturation of a ferrite core with the position of the key. The matrix scanning is done in analog using what's effectively an old school FPGA. The matrix driver requires about 20W of power and around 24V input. After a bit of use, some chips will get up to about 40C.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to convert the protocol to USB. Best I can tell there needs to be some sort of serial handshake to initialize the protocol. Eventually I turned my attention to the internal card edge connector on the board. I'm not sure what its original use was, probably factory testing. The important thing is that it sat on a parallel bus which the two main chips used to communicate. After a bit of sniffing I was able to decipher it:
I whipped up some QMK code which utilized raw port IO to read the bus in real time. The keyboard works perfectly over USB. It is completely reversible should this board ever be used with an 8850 terminal in the future (if any exist).
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