The Greatest Keyboard of All Time Reborn (2018) [video]
I just saw one of these on Craigslist.  I used one of these for years at my first &quot;real job&quot; and loved it, but <i>wow</i> is it noisy.<p>In the 90s, my dad and I built custom (higher-end) PCs for small businesses and individuals.  We carefully weeded out parts that we didn&#x27;t like and put a high priority on excellent displays[1], good keyboards and mice[2].  To this day, I&#x27;m surprised at how little thought is paid to such a critical input device.  And it&#x27;s not that users don&#x27;t care about it, it&#x27;s almost like it was forgotten.<p>My personal preference, in this category, though was the Northgate Omnikey[0].  It was a multi-platform keyboard that was able to be plugged in to an AT&#x2F;XT, Amiga and a few others.  The model I had was left-oriented F-keys (I miss that!) and included extra keys and tools so that you could put the CTRL where &quot;Caps Lock&quot; was, and &quot;alt&quot; where the left CTRL was, which was how we configured them ... no more accidental CAPS LOCK hits when aiming for &quot;A&quot;.  Unfortunately, my parents sold it in an estate sale a while back.  I doubt they got anywhere near the $100-$200 that these sell for when functional (depending on condition ... most are <i>very</i> yellow due to the plastic oxidizing but you can still find some that maintain their gray-white&#x2F;blue color).  Pretty rare to find a keyboard that resells for about the price they were new (sans inflation).<p>I&#x27;d put the IBM at a very close second.  The Northgate was easily on par as far as &quot;feel&quot; was concerned, but the IBM keyboards had this <i>loud</i> &quot;ping&quot; sound that sort-of rang after a key was pressed (springs), which the Omnikey lacked.  I couldn&#x27;t own a keyboard like that if I wanted to continue programming since, at the time, most of my programming[4] was done between midnight and 3:00 AM with fleeting parental approval (fleeting ... if I woke them up).<p>I feel that keyboard quality is something that manufacturers have missed the ball on -- especially on notebooks.  This Christmas I picked out a Thinkpad for my parents.  They love it.  My Dad now wants a new desktop keyboard, though, because he <i>really likes</i> the Thinkpad keyboard.  I was a little puzzled -- his current board feels <i>exactly the same</i> to my fingers.  After thinking about it for a bit, I&#x27;m fairly certain I know where the problem is: despite the same feel, his desktop keyboard weighs almost nothing.  Every time you touch a key, or even reach out for it, it slides a little.  So every few sentences, you&#x27;re re-positioning the keyboard.  At my typing speed, this means repositioning the keyboard <i>constantly</i>.<p>It makes me wonder if in all of this effort to make things lighter and more portable, the industry miscalculated by applying that logic to peripheral keyboards.  I&#x27;d prefer my keyboard to weight twice as much as my current laptop.  To me, I&#x27;d rather have a keyboard heavier than a notebook PC.  Between the two I use most regularly, one is wired, the other is wireless, both would move with a reasonable gust of wind.  Why do I care if it&#x27;s convenient to carry when it <i>never leaves my desktop</i>?  There&#x27;s much greater value is in it staying put while I use it.  At my office, several developers I work with have purchased their own keyboards.  Some of it is &quot;cool factor&quot;, but one thing I found consistently about the boards they&#x27;ve chosen -- <i>All</i> of them weigh in at 3 times the weight of the typical $15 board and most have sticky rubber feet.  About half hadn&#x27;t realized the difference until I pointed it out.  I even had one co-worker that got upset at the realization -- he&#x27;d narrowed the choice down to 2 keyboards and opted for the lighter one.  I made him unhappy with his decision.  Oops!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deskthority.net&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Northgate_OmniKey&#x2F;101" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deskthority.net&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Northgate_OmniKey&#x2F;101</a><p>[1] I can&#x27;t remember the brand, but nearly every computer monitor was XGA 14&quot;; we only sold 16+&quot; and went with Trinitron models and models with similar technology (at the time, I think Sony had an active patent on the technology, but we had quality issues so we switched to a different brand that I assume didn&#x27;t work exactly like the Trinitron, but still had the color clarity).<p>[2] We never found a mouse worth a damn -- we experimented with an early model of ball-free mice, but it was trash.<p>[3] I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s an intelligent, technical, term for that but I don&#x27;t care to search for it.<p>[4] I was writing a BBS from scratch in Borland&#x2F;Turbo Pascal after deciding to toss out the code from my Telegard hack.  I&#x27;ve actually tried to revisit that using SSH as transport (instead of dial-up) but ran out of motivation.