JUKI FD-01R

[subcat]

From the depths of China comes this ex-data entry workhorse. Fallen from grace, its life in a glitzy air-conditioned Tokyo office has come to an end, and it now lies destitute in a dumpster somewhere. Shipped off to China to be put out of its misery and scrapped, I knew I had to grab it as soon as I saw it.

The astute among you will recognise this as a new variant of the FD-0100, the Topre OEM product that would eventually be developed into the Realforce. Information is scarce, but we know the FD-0100 was offered to Japan's commercial and industrial sector, as sandy55 discovered a model with air travel reservation-specific keycaps many years ago. Sometime around early 2005 some stock of the base model FD-0100 appeared in Akihabara stores. My bet is this was Topre offloading their extra units as they prepared to move to the 108- rather than 106-key layout and do away with PS/2 in favour of USB.

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It's evident that this thing's had a hard life the housing has snapped, the cable is cut, its switches are scratchy. I hope to do more work on it when I have time. From the date code, we can determine that this unit is from 1997, 4 years before Topre debuted the Realforce.

Cleaning the keycaps alone took over 4 hours of hand-scrubbing, but they're finally clean! For the time being I decided to put them on my 86U with some supplementary 108UH-ANLG caps. I absolutely love the overwhelming number of data-entry sublegends, blue front-printing and grey integrated numpad, which has seen so much use that it's super shiny, the texture is wearing off and some legends have begun to fade.

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[002]

Nice job on the cleanup of the caps. It's a shame that the case is in such a bad state but nevertheless it's an excellent find. JUKI stuff is so cool

[subcat]

Nice job on the cleanup of the caps. It's a shame that the case is in such a bad state but nevertheless it's an excellent find. JUKI stuff is so cool

thanks jukibro hopefully one day we can get a Celavi to complete the collection

[mcmaxmcmc]

You never cease to make my Nissho seem like a beginner Topre keyboard! Amazing find as always.