I am obsessed with the IBM Type M keyboard, and have been for years, much to the chagrin of my officemates I’m sure. When I was in college, I would often go to university surplus sales to pick up as many as I could get my hands on. Knowing that they were no longer manufactured (at that time), I had to stock up on them because I needed enough to last me the rest of my life.
A while back IBM or Lexmark sold the patents to a company called Unicomp, and since then I’ve picked up a few more keyboards.
Over time I’ve developed a couple favorites among the bunch. My absolute favorite is a filthy one that until recently had an ancient WordPerfect template on it. A few years back I spilled an entire glass of water into it, and many of the keys stopped working. I was pretty upset of course — I only had a few more keyboards to last a lifetime — and a few days later before I threw it out I decided to plug it in and give it another try. Thankfully, it worked just fine and is back as my first string keyboard.
I’ve had an iMac at home for a while. Most Apple hardware is just great from a design standpoint, but the keyboard and mice for their desktop systems are just awful. The keyboard is so mushy it’s impossible to type quickly, and the lack of tactile feedback on my fingers makes it painful after a while. It’s so poor that I’ve never really used it for anything typing-intensive: hacking, blogging, writing long-winded emails. And while I actually have no problem with a one-button mouse, the Apple mouse feels so awkward in my hand that it too hurts after a short time. I replaced the mouse right away with a Logitech MX500 mouse which works perfectly, including the mouse wheel and right button, but I’ve struggled with the keyboard. All of my old IBM/Unicomp keyboards are 101-key and PS/2. I got a PS/2-to-USB dongle which itself worked great, but lacking a Windows/Command/Meta key it just wasn’t functional enough.
So much to my surprise earlier this year Unicomp started manufacturing USB 104-key keyboards. I ordered one a couple of days ago and it arrived today. I’m using this post largely as a test for it. It’s working great.
A few things about setting it up and using it:
- By default the Windows key acts as Command and the Alt key acts as Option/Alt. This means they’re backward from their layout on the normal Apple keyboard. I swapped the modifiers in the keyboard preferences pane.
- On my other Unicomp keyboards, the keycaps are switchable. The caps just pop right off, with the key staying in underneath. Only some of the keys on this new keyboard seem to do that, and Alt and Windows aren’t two of them. I didn’t want this to be confusing to people — this is sort of the “public access” computer in our home — so I actually popped the keys off and swapped them. When you do this it makes a god awful noise, but they’re designed to do that.
- This is a standard PC layout, so there aren’t any keys for changing the volume or ejecting the DVD. However, scroll lock and pause do work for dimming and brightening the display, and you can hold down F12 to eject the disk. For the sound, I just use the sound menu bar item.