What calendar did Ortek use?

[Daniel Beardsmore]

There's something weird about the numbering on Ortek's Intel P8049AH microcontrollers: what appears to be the date code, seems implausible. Examples:

Ortek MCK-101FX:

MCK-101FX-4.jpg (169.9 KiB) Viewed 2221 times

CMI MO-1101C (MCK 101FX):

CMI_MO-1101C_GM8MCK101SX_19.jpg (631.4 KiB) Viewed 2221 times

[wiki]ETC Power Glide 105[/wiki]:

ETC Power Glide 105 -- controller IC.jpg (329.21 KiB) Viewed 2221 times

Looking at the chips, we have:

Ortek MCK-101FX: 8952 ORTEK93 — alps.tw Type T5 (A), Minguo year 89 is 2000, but there are no Windows keys

CMI MO-1101C: 8917 ORTEK93 — alps.tw Type T8, ditto to both

ETC Power Glide 105: 8527 ORTEK90 — scrawly Alps SKCM White: Minguo year 85 is 1996

Taking the two-digit years to be Gregorian years, the dates of 1989 for the first two are plausible, but I doubt that a scrawly white Alps keyboard would be using chips from 1985! They don't appear to be Minguo years either, considering the lack of Windows keys on the first two and that pine white Alps in 1996 seems pretty unlikely.

Unfortunately my Power Glide case (from OEMMAX) has no date mouldings, nor do any of the others, above.

There's at least two more chips on the Power Glide, but the only one that has what could be a date code, would be from 1992; 1992 as a year, I could accept (seems pretty reasonable to me for pine white Alps).

What on earth calendar were these guys using? I might have to delete everything Ortek from [wiki]Keyboards and switches by year[/wiki] for now because I've been taking the date codes literally, which seemed fine until I discovered the code on my Power Glide.

[chzel]

According to this, the date code is the second line.
Considering that the 8049 had masked ROM (meaning the firmware was written when the chip was manufactured), the "ORTEKxx" line could pretty well mean "manufactured for Ortek in the year xx".

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I've finally found a photo of one (not from Ortek) where the top-right code reads "0663"; it seems curious that in most cases, the top-right code is a valid YYWW date (YY from the 70s to the 00s, and WW from 01 to 52)!

ORTEK90 would be out by two years from the code on the other chip that implied 1992.

The snag for me is that I'm trying to use the dates to date unknown switches, so I can't use the switches as guides to the dates!

1990 and 1993 are all perfectly reasonable dates for these keyboards though. It would put the changeover from T8 (older) to T5 (newer) Alps clones at 1993, which is about right — that's a similar time to my theorised changeover from OA2 to T1 at 1994–1995.

Cheers.

[zts]

I've finally found a photo of one (not from Ortek) where the top-right code reads "0663"; it seems curious that in most cases, the top-right code is a valid YYWW date (YY from the 70s to the 00s, and WW from 01 to 52)!

ORTEK90 would be out by two years from the code on the other chip that implied 1992.

The snag for me is that I'm trying to use the dates to date unknown switches, so I can't use the switches as guides to the dates!

1990 and 1993 are all perfectly reasonable dates for these keyboards though. It would put the changeover from T8 (older) to T5 (newer) Alps clones at 1993, which is about right — that's a similar time to my theorised changeover from OA2 to T1 at 1994–1995.

Cheers.

It'd be helpful if Ortek or somebody built an Ortek date code calculator like Seagate did for their drives. Interesting about Seagate is that their week numbers (WW) apparently count from the start of the new fiscal year which falls on July 1. Days are counted from Saturday to Friday in a week. Maybe Ortek used some similar company-internal logic with their date codes.

[Hak Foo]

Is it possible it's not even a week/year number at all, but a stepping number or batch ID-- something that would increase over time, but not necessarily at a fixed time rate.

Perhaps even "the first few were the week or year, but then we started doing different revisions and it fell off track"

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Here's something even more bizarre:

Oriental Tech OK-100M controller.jpg (276.83 KiB) Viewed 2089 times

Datacomp DFK192 controller.jpg (207.52 KiB) Viewed 2123 times

The first picture is the controller from my Oriental Tech OK-100M. The second is from my Datacomp DFK192.

Both are Signetics chips and both appear to have a date code of 9122.

The thing is, the OK-100M is from 1991 or 1992 (the membrane says 1991 on it, and the box has a 1992 auction lot sticker), and the DFK192 is from 1991 (date stamp moulded into the case). There's another chip on the DFK192 PCB that had a 1990 date code.

Strangely enough, both keyboards came from Ascaii …

[Edit: Argh … first photo was also the DFK192 — got mixed up, as I couldn't get one single miserable wretched good photo of that PCB]

[002]

Here's another one that falls between the examples in the first post. No idea if it helps you or not:

ortek.jpg (414.56 KiB) Viewed 2094 times

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I think my brain is far more fried today than I realised. I can't get Macs working and I've uploaded two photos of the same chip.

002: I'd like to know what that switch is.

The top-right code may remain a mystery. In some cases they're not valid dates, and a 1895 date for white Alps is nonsense. My take on the "ORTEK90" etc was that it was the year that the chip was designed (the ROM code, now that I've learnt that keyboards really do run off actual microcontrollers instead of custom circuitry) which would leave the chips with no date code of any kind. However, it appears that I just have to assume that they're the years of manufacture on the basis that there's nothing else in an Ortek keyboard to use as date evidence anywhere.

Ortek are still on the go; I live in hope that some Chinese speaker will convince them to yield the manufacturer name(s) of their Alps clone switches: if they were to say Himake, that would be proof enough for me. Ortek have never responded to any of my own e-mails, though, ever.

[002]

Here's a crappy pic of the internals of the switch from my board:

ortek_switch_internals.jpg (59.19 KiB) Viewed 2048 times

[Daniel Beardsmore]

OK, thanks. OA2.

[Zilog Jones]

Here's the 8049 in my MCK-101FX:

DSC01125.jpg (809.03 KiB) Viewed 1966 times

This keyboard was actually purchased in 1991. The back of the PCB says 1990 and "Mode No" [sic] MCK 101 SX-B. Hope this helps.

I'll try and take more pics of the keyboard for the wiki when I get a chance, although I've lost the cover for the F-key cards