IBM Model M keyboard repair tip

On 24 September 2011 18:36, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: I would not be able to do either so it's entirely academic to me. Nor would I butcher a keyboard like that - I'd just go and get an appropriate one from the bits pile. The point is that PS/2 keyboards were not necessarily attached to PS/2s. They became an extremely widespread industry standard, even beyond PC compatibles - e.g. later Acorn ARM RISC machines such as the RiscPC and A4000 and A7000 used them, too, as did some PReP Mac clones. Until USB came along, most computer keyboards from the start of the 1990s on, for 15-odd years, were PS/2 keyboards. The name no longer had anything at all to do with IBM PS/2 computers and continued long after the PS/2 was completely forgotten except by historians and collectors. It did not refer to the type of computer it was to be attached to - it referred to the *combination* of the connector and the signalling, and the same basic interface was widely used in 2 flavours: PS/2-interface keyboards and PS/2-interface mice. This was around for about 3? as long as AT keyboards existed for and I suspect there were hundreds of thousands of times as many PS/2 devices as AT devices ever made. It's not about the computer being used. It's not about the connector, which was used for other things too, I'm sure. It's not about the protocol, as that was used for other devices with a physically-incompatible connector. It was the /combination/ of the 2 protocols (K/b and mouse) and the single shared connector. That's what a PS/2 interface meant. Q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_connector -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508