Keyboard "enthusiasts"

[Geoffrey Oltmans]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 11:35 AM, Guy Sotomayor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> …are the bane of my existence and should all rot in hell.
>
> Sorry, I just received an email from a “keyboard enthusiast” who was
> looking for
> various IBM 327x keyboards and wanted to know if I could help him and I
> needed
> to vent a little.
>
> I sent him a polite “no way in hell” response but I’m still angry about
> it.  These
> terminals are hard enough to find.  And more often than not, the keyboard
> is
> missing because some “enthusiast” thought it would be cool to convert it
> to a PC
> keyboard.  ARG!  And of course the keyboards that they want are the
> “typewriter”
> keyboards (all of my 3278 terminals have the “data entry keyboard”).
>
>
In their defense (and yes, I think they are awful no good people), I guess
you can't fault them too much since up until fairly recently a quality
mechanical keyboard was either too expensive or practically impossible to
source for a modern computer, what with the obsession with flat square
keycaps with next to no travel, etc. At least now we are starting to get
some decent lower cost options in the marketplace as new. Maybe these new
keyboards will dissuade people from destroying rare artifacts.