The TRS-80 Journey Continues

[Fred Cisin]

On Wed, 25 May 2022, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
> Another question for the masters here.
> I just tried to revive my Model III.  More than half the
> keys don't work anymore.  What is the conventional wisdom
> on cleaning these old TRS-80 keyboards?  Is compressed air
> usually enough?  Can I spray the switches with something
> like DeOxit safely?  I expect when I go to revive my
> Model I's they are likely to be in the same state.

A really stupid suggestion:   (cleaning the key mechanisms makes more 
sense):

More than a quarter of a century ago, I revived several of my TRS-80's. 
None of the keys worked on one keyboard, and many of the keys didn't work 
on another.  But, I noticed that repeatedly pressing an intermittent key 
made it work reliably, and repeatedly pressing a "dead" key got it 
working!

I had a Rochester Dynatyper and a KGS-80, which were the two most 
common versions of a box of solenoids to place on top of a typewriter to 
convert it into a printer. Those came out when there were no cheap 
printers.  There also existed a box, made by an outfit in Walnut Creek, 
to put UNDER a Selectric that pulled down on the keys, but I neever had 
one of those, and that was ONLY for Selectric, whereas the Rochester 
Dynatyper and the KGS-80 worked on ANYTHING with a normal keyboard, even a 
Merganthaler!   I remember once at the West Coast Computer Faire, somebody 
showed a prototype of one that used fishing line and pulleys to work the 
carriage return of a MANUAL (non-electric) typewriter - every successful 
carriage return got a round of applause.


I used the Dynatyper and the KGS-80 to "type" a few hundred pages.
The TRS-80 keyboards came back to life!

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred