IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard | Hacker News Reader

IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard

rs-online.com

28 pointsrbanffy10 comments

> There is also a solenoid inside the enclosure, but since the keyboard is not powered up, this was not being activated — and these are seemingly particularly loud! But why? The teletypewriters, paper terminals and card punches which preceded such early “glass teletypes” would have been very noisy indeed, hence it was decided that terminals like the IBM 3278 would need to provide much more positive feedback than simply that provided by a clicky switch module.

Reading this, I thought it could not possibly be true -- the keys are so loud and clicky already. But it turns out it actually was the case, as demonstrated here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT9CHub9Cxs

At the risk of dating myself, I’m still looking for a keyboard as good feeling as this.

I never had the pleasure of using one of those. For me it was seeking the feel of a DEC VT-102.

The IBM Type M was and still is my stand-in.

The VT1xx keyboards used linear switches, you may want to look at modern mechanical keyboards with linear switches as a rough approximation. Having tried typing on one in a museum, I recall the VT1xx as relatively scratchy compared with more modern keyboards, although that could have been a wear and tear issue.

The keyboards of the VT2xx/3xx series are awful, and the later ones had rubber dome keyboards which are among the nicer rubber dome keyboards I've tried. I own both a VT320 and VT420, and managed to get a new old stock keyboard for each.

I've never used them, so I can't vouch for them, but it seems like beam spring keyboards are available. Have you tried any of these? https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/store/

I ordered the round 2 beam springs from this guy like 2 years ago. They are still in production.

I have not but I’ll look. 90% of my computer use these days is laptop on my actual lap so I don’t have a real need. But there is a definite want!

Can it be used with X window system? X windows has key codes 0xFD01 to 0xFD1E for the 3270 terminal keys. I don't know the meaning on the actual IBM terminals, but they seem to match the key codes that are defined in X windows.

Yeah. x3270 can take care of all the right translation things to hook into X, and has been around since '89.

There a few things that don't work straight across a telnet connection, hence the translation layer.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/x3270

Converting these keyboards to speak to a modern PC involves replacing the controller board with a new one with open source firmware. You can program the keys to send any scan code you like.

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