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by firat 4477 days ago
dat keyboard.
2 comments

I would be more than happy to have modern versions that were so great to type on. While I really enjoy my iMac I cannot stand Apple keyboards or mice. The mush boards at work provided by Dell aren't much better.
I actually bought apple keyboards for work because i can't stand super high travel keyboards like the old 286 style PC's.

But to each his own, I think i'm just used to laptop style keyboard travel.

Compaq keyboards weren't all that great, when compared to the IBM boards of the same era. The Compaq keyboards were quite mushy.

Where Compaq had it all over IBM was its video boards. IBM gave you a choice of two video boards: CGA and MDA. CGA gave you color and graphics, but at the expense of high quality text. With MDA, you sacrificed the graphics but the characters in text mode were rendered with a 9x14 bitmap rather than an 8x8 bitmap. This resulted in a huge quality improvement. What Compaq did was develop a video board/monitor combination that supported the higher resolution rendering in text mode, but still supported CGA quality graphics. It was a nice compromise for the time.

(The other compromise board was the 'Hercules' board. These boards connected to an IBM MDA monitor, but had a special high resolution graphics mode. They had high quality text, and better high-resolution graphics than CGA, but they weren't as widely supported.)

machanical keyboards are still around. Cherry MX switches are the most common.

http://deskthority.net/ http://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/buying_guid...

You can still buy Model Ms, I believe they are more common.
Lots of Model Ms and more for buy/sell on Reddit's Mechmarket:

http://www.reddit.com/r/mechmarket

Unicomp still makes them

http://www.pckeyboard.com/

Yeah, I've had one for several years now. I love it. Highly recommended if you dislike typing on mushy oatmeal.
I'd like to throw Das Keyboard into the ring: http://www.daskeyboard.com/
my old physics lab was filled with those, the original IBM ones and some Fujitsu clones. So clickity!