Fujitsu FM Towns FMT-KB205 review (Fujitsu leaf spring 3rd generation)

[Chyros]

Today we look at a keyboard from a curious Japanese PC from the late 90s, the Fujitsu FM Towns. Quite a looker, and with very nice switches! Hope you enjoy the video .

[Muirium]

Damn it, that's a fine piece of kit in an intelligent layout. Quit giving me ideas!

Thanks for the visual explanation on Fujitsu leaf spring switches. Puts it more clearly than text can. They're actually quite smart, and sound appealing; especially with those monstrous caps. Love the pinkie finger homing bars! And those mysterious secondary legends on 0 and - … they look like ISO Enter keys, one rotated, like ancient typewriter tab keys? Intriguing.

The two keys in front have my mind leap to Canon:



More modifiers are always good.

Anyway, I bet I could work out that matrix and get it running on USB. The classier thing to do, however, would be to crack the protocol (and add it to TMK etc.) so you can keep the classy original cable. That stuff's quite beyond me, though. Another idea would be to build an internal converter and route its USB output through that cable, using a passive converter on the far end to normal USB. I'd try that once I had it up and running the simple way…

How much are these, again?

[TNT]

The Canon Cat always impressed me. Were there ever any other iterations of the "leap" system later on?

[Findecanor]

The Canon Cat always impressed me. Were there ever any other iterations of the "leap" system later on?

Dunno about follow-ups, but there were predecessors. Apparently, the system had originally been prototyped at Apple ... intended to become the "Macintosh" before Jobs took over from Jef Raskin and turned the project into making what you could call a cost-reduced Lisa.
Raskin left Apple to start his own company which continued development of the system, and they released a "Swyft" card for the Apple II with the software on. The Apple keys were used as Leap keys.

[Muirium]

Shrug. Maybe, despite every sign to the contrary, they finally got big in Japan?

[davkol]

The pair of thumb keys in the front is a feature of the thumb-shift keyboard design created at Fujitsu. It's distinct from current mainstream Japanese input methods. Basically, the split "spacebar" is actually a pair of "shift" keys so that Japanese scripts can be more efficiently fitted in the "alpha" section (gasp, layers!), and the input (conversion) switching keys are in the front.

[Elrick]

Love it, the creation of a PC system that eventually caters towards Hentai Pron.

Way to go Japan, you guys have seen the future of the PC way before anyone else. Love the layout of the Towns keyboard, pity we have all been addicted to the US ANSI junk-ware layout.

Typical of Japanese hardware, they simply go into a world of their own and stop producing it anymore, like giving up once the Americans stomp all over them, yet again.

They should simply start a school on Giving Up and never achieve anything, because it fits into the 21st Century sentiment of Homer Simpson. Why plan for anything when you know it shall never happen or occur in the future.

Another good review of a now dead system, only being promoted and used by those whom have a huge stockpile of Hentai Pron.

[zrrion]

the split "spacebar" is actually a pair of "shift" keys so that Japanese scripts can be more efficiently fitted in the "alpha" section (gasp, layers!)

Is this why the alpha block is split into 2 colours? one set of colours for each of the layers?

[Findecanor]

Apparently, Fujitsu carried the layout with the bi-coloured alphanumeric keys from the Fujitsu OASYS 100G Word Processor (1982). It's predecessor the OASYS 100 had the thumb-shift keys and cursor key arrangement but not bi-coloured alpha keys (or numeric keyboard).

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Otherwise, I have seen some vintage keyboards colour the embedded numpad on the right-hand side of the keyboard differently. Those do not include the entire right-hand alpha block.