My keyboard's birthday

[dsrtao]

My keyboard had a birthday. Five days ago. Sorry I missed it.

My keyboard is now eighteen years old.

Long live the Model M!

My backup Model M is four years younger.

The personal keyboard that I keep at the office is a Northgate Omni/Key 101 -- it's about to be fifteen.

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

My oldest Model M is 23 years old (DOM sticker says 13-06-1986), my "cooking" M on the desk next door is a mere stripling at 13 years old. I lost one Model M by leaving it at work where I was doing part-time contracting and failed to recover it before the company went tits-up -- I won't do that again.

My current typing engine is an Olivetti keyboard, rescued when the original PC was skipped -- like the IBMs it was developed by typewriter engineers and uses the buckling-spring system so it has the feel-and-sound of an IBM without the parasitic weight, basically a Ferrari version of the IBM Cadillac Yank-tank. DOM is 12-02-1998 according to the sticker on the back so it is still a teenager.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Are you planning to sift some cake crumbs into the spaces between its keys?

[dsrtao]

No point. One of the reasons the Model M and good clones can survive this long is because they are generally cleanable.

[cellio]

Wow.

I had a fairly generic keyboard that I used for about 14 years because I had fixed the placement of the control key in hardware darnit (before the OS made that easy), but everything is USB these days and I was getting tired of using adapters. (Plural because I also had the almost-perfect mouse for a while. Now I have a different almost-perfect mouse, so that's ok.)

[jducoeur]

I'm amused -- I was just in a friendly argument at work about the Model M (and related styles) vs. my personal favorite, the Microsoft Natural Pro. My keyboard isn't *quite* as old as yours, but I think I've carried this one through six jobs over twelve years now. (I own four Naturals, but I'm still partial to the original, before they started adding all the specialized keys.)

An interesting variant of the old Mac-vs-PC debate...