JUKI FD-01R
Posted: 02 Jun 2020, 03:32
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.
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.
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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hopefully one day we can get a Celavi to complete the collection