deskthority

This one is a bit bizarre, and the IBM provenance is... weird.



The back label, which was unfortunately torn or cleaned off by the seller. Thankfully, there's still a photo:



Learning System Sciences appears to be a complete mystery. Possibly an internal development team at IBM, or a customer training division.

The PN which follows IBM's general syntax seems to indicate that this was some sort of a prototype for their 4693 POS keyboards, which were some flavor of rubber dome. This one isn't:




Construction is very much prototype-ish.. self tapping screws, flimsy case, etc. I'm surprised that they used a plate.



The bigger the glob, the better the job:



There are two cables - one is a short PS/2 female, the other is a standard long coiled PS/2 male.

Actual manufacturer was not IBM - I'm guessing that this is around the time where they no longer had any keyboard manufacturing ability:



Further cementing prototype or other design stage project, Promed Keyboard Group is an interesting company that's still around.

The seller had one more keyboard of the same type, obviously made by TG3 (much beefier) and possibly a later stage prototype, but after buying it they either didn't want to sell it to me anymore and/or shredded it by mistake, claiming that they can't test it even though I told them I don't care. Oh well, not like I have keyboard space anymore at this point

Awesome piece of history you got there!

It definitely seems like a prototype for IBM's 49-key POS keyboard (and its LCD-equipped Model M8 cousin), which has two slightly different variants; a silver-square badged one possibly known as the IBM 3320 (for 4683/4684) made in Mexico (possibly in their own factory there), and the usually unbadged but far more common Model M7 (for 4694 and SurePOS 700 Series) that was made in both Taiwan and China and is possibly still in production via Toshiba. According to IBM's 1995 Store Systems Parts Catalog, one of these variants (or an even older one) was on the market during the Lexmark era, so during a time when IBM still had its own resources (via Mexico and Greenock).

Other interesting details/differences include that all the production 49-key keypads I can find use an RS485 based modular SDL-like connections instead of PS/2. They also use two-piece keycaps with the top caps including dark grey with legends and transparent for custom labels. And yes, all were rubberdome.

Possible IBM 3320 (source: eBay):


Toshiba Model M7 (source: me):



Were you able to get the board running?