Dustbury waxes nostalgic about the old IBM keyboards:
Old keyboards, at least on the Wintel side of the aisle, still have a great deal to offer: they have solid feel, they don’t have a bunch of Windows-specific keys to mess with, and they last forever.
There’s actually a serious issue here. I have a client who’s only able to use an IBM keyboard (or equivalent keyboard with a hardware keyclick). He’s quadraplegic and needs the auditory feedback. This presents an upcoming problem: USB to PS/2 converters don’t work (power draw problems) and fewer and fewer notebook computers have PS/2 ports.
I’ve found a solution for him. But the issue remains: technological change (particularly in the computer industry) is not an un-alloyed blessing. I could give dozens of examples of this. Take the old Singer Workstation, for example. Probably the perfect tool for dozens of everyday business tasks. It wasn’t until the advent of programs like Quickbooks that the industry began to return to the level of efficiency that it represented—and they’re still not as efficient.
I just looked at the manufacture date on my home-box keyboard: 10/6/90. Fourteen years.
I have to believe that somewhere there’s a storage compartment just full of these things.