Best relic or discovery 2014

[The Keyboard Oracle]

The nominees in the category Best relic or discovery 2014 are:

HaaTa's Siemens Tastatur 280 S 22241-F100-A12 GS 1 • The 280 S 22241-F100-A12 GS 1 sports (besides a catchy name) clicky, tactile, magnetic switches underneath huge keycaps. It uses a unique type of magnetic reed switch which is actuated when the poll becomes magnetized.

HaaTa's Ultrasonic • This Smith-Corona Ultrasonic I Plus turned out to be marvel of mechanical engineering. It is an "acoustic-sense" keyboard, using little slappers that hit a bar to encode a time difference which in turn will hit the transducers on either sides.

IBM’s UK Patent 1,016,993 • This recently rediscovered patent from 1963 shows a split non-staggered ergonomic keyboard design, which makes it pretty much the progenitor of keyboards like the Maltron, Kinesis Advantage and Ergodox.

Parak's IBM 4704 77-key keyboard • Parak poked everybody's eyes out with the rarest member of the IBM 4704 family, a tenkeyless IBM Model F keyboard, neatly resting in the original packaging.

Xavierblak's B-52 Stratofortress keyboard, the Amkey MPTK-129 • Xavierblak found this colorful vintage Amkey MPTK-129 keyboard from B-52 Stratofortress, which was then equipped by xwhatsit with a modern controller.

And the Wingnut for Best relic or discovery 2014, as voted for by the members of deskthority, goes to...

Spoiler:

This Smith-Corona Ultrasonic I Plus turned out to be marvel of mechanical engineering. It is an "acoustic-sense" keyboard, using little slappers that hit a bar to encode a time difference which in turn will hit the transducers on either sides.


The Ultrasonic's ability to communicate with dolphins is as of yet undiscovered.

[7bit]

HaaTa really deserves a wingnut made of real gold!

[HaaTa]

And here I thought last year was going to be the peak of my keyboard discoveries. In terms of quantity, yes, I found many more keyboards in 2013 that easily could have been contenders for the award. But this one blows them all away in terms of sheer absurdity, it makes me happy that the community agrees with me

I'll still be hunting down rare keyboards in 2015, but I'm starting to think that we'll see less sheer awesomeness in general in comparison to the last 4 years of the award. However, that doesn't mean I won't try

I'm sure there's lots of strange stuff out there like this single piece mylar? membrane (double sided) traces with dual cap-sense and contact sense matrix.
DSC_1261 by triplehaata, on Flickr

(I still don't understand how they soldered leds directly to the membrane without melting the membrane...)

[Nuum]

A nice keyboard and well deserved, congrats! Although I liked the Amkey keyboard a bit more.