Post the ugliest keyboards you've seen!

[kbdfr]

I like beige, it is the proper color for a computer. I also like square shapes, domed tops on boxes that you can't stack papers on are a waste of space.

[Blaise170]

I like beige, it is the proper color for a computer. I also like square shapes, domed tops on boxes that you can't stack papers on are a waste of space.

I like dome tops, then other people can't stack their papers on your box.

[vometia]

Then, well, it was the 90s. I had little money for the entire decade, and I still lived in ENGLAND. There were brief flashes of color at the beginning of the decade and a handful of other times, but because it was ENGLAND, they didn't sell. By the time anything got to a price I could afford, "you can have any color you like so long as it's [beige!]"

I still think of the '90s as The Grey Decade: personal computing descended into absolute boredom compared to the '80s 8-bit heyday and before it really took off again in the new millennium. It seemed everything had to be exorcised of any colour or interest. Not just computing, but a lot of the music and other pop culture was like that: what can one say about a decade whose highlight was Oasis and Blur's rather pedestrian bickering? Though I do think Damon Albarn summed up his rivals well as "Oasis Quo", a band that would've been an also-ran in the '70s taking the top slot in the '90s said it all.

Also cars, as previously mentioned. I still remember ads featuring some boring kids at a boring school being excited because his boring insurance salesman dad was going to pick him up in a boring Espace knock-off made even more excruciatingly boring by being in boring grey. I was just bemused, thinking that advertisers have pretty much everything at their disposal to be interesting and exciting, and that's their idea of what a schoolboy finds awesome? Ugh.

I also know the sort of people you speak of who like to keep their homes as uninteresting as possible, too. They're actually quite painful places to be because there is absolutely nothing to focus one's attention: and God knows the conversation isn't going to do it.

[fohat]

https://www.consumerreports.org/consume ... oring-now/

[ThePewster]

Damn. And I thought stickerbombed cars looked worse.

[Findecanor]

Card readers on the keyboard? Done. Pen holders? Done. Phone holders? Done. A lighter holder is most definitely a new concept... although it begs the obvious question: where is the cigarette holder?

Agreed. That keyboard is wrrong on multiple levels.
I'd bet the keyboard serves like a large ash tray after a while.

[depletedvespene]

Agreed. That keyboard is wrrong on multiple levels.
I'd bet the keyboard serves like a large ash tray after a while.

You just HAD to stir up that bleak memory again, hadn't you? Damn, it's taking me quite an effort NOT to tell it and get it stuck on everyone else's neurons as well...

[Darkshado]

Zu spät. What the hell was that? Yes, I know, a two minute ad for a USB lighter, but as I said, what the hell was that?

[depletedvespene]

Being over two minutes long, I'm ready to believe it's a parody and not a real product.

pleasohgodpleaseletthisbethecaseohpleaseohplease

[Findecanor]

Japanese TV ads are in a league of their own ... That is just one of several films from the brand's Youtube channel.

Smoking next to your keyboard would be disrespecting your keyboard, and BTW in extension disrespecting this community.
Personally I think that tobacco and smoking should be banned completely.

[depletedvespene]

Japanese TV ads are in a league of their own ... That is just one of several films from the brand's Youtube channel.

Smoking next to your keyboard would be disrespecting your keyboard, ……

Not only that, you DON'T use the cartridge slot as an "closeable ash tray". And you don't give the evil look to the git who tells you you're not supposed to do that, FFS.

[AMongoose]

Agreed. That keyboard is wrrong on multiple levels.
I'd bet the keyboard serves like a large ash tray after a while.

Spoiler:

So you're saying we should have a usb ligther built into the keyboard instead of a stand for a separate lighter?

[savantstrike]

Card readers on the keyboard? Done. Pen holders? Done. Phone holders? Done. A lighter holder is most definitely a new concept... although it begs the obvious question: where is the cigarette holder?

Agreed. That keyboard is wrrong on multiple levels.
I'd bet the keyboard serves like a large ash tray after a while.

I'm not honestly sure what just happened, but that was not was I was expecting.

[701c]

Look what massdrop did

[fohat]

I really like that green one, except for the bottom row legends. The exposed switch bodies look out of place, however.

[depletedvespene]

That case is awful, even more than the colourway for the caps. The combination of "exposed" in the bottom row and barely uncovered on the top is incongruous.

The legends on the bottom row AND on the backspace key are nothing to be proud of, either.

[scottc]

Looks pretty bad. If there's a plate included, it's not even attached to the case. It's like an upside-down TX60. Not at all a fan.



Didn't zslane design that?

edit: MD says it has an alu plate but it's only visible in one picture?

[digital_matthew]

Aahhh yes my F122 is a sea of soothing beige. But yeah it's too much even for me. I put red Ctrl and blue Alt keys on it to break it up.

[mike52787]

Look what massdrop did

wow that looks like absolute shit

sorry zslane but you've outdone yourself this time

[zslane]

I concede that the aesthetics of the Hermes Rocket typewriter are an acquired taste.

[lemur]

I don't like the case... but I think I wholly understand all of its design decisions.. lots of old timey keyboards had huge in your face logos... and of course.. lots of them you saw some of the key mechanisms underneath the front..

I think that view of the switches at the bottom is its best design quirk... and while the thing I like least about the case is the big huge logo.. that is probably what makes it most like the old timey keyboards of the past.

[Blaise170]

If the case was more standard I'd probably like it better.

[AMongoose]

Eh, I like it. And I usually hate exposed switches but it's a cool nod to the original and tasteful enough. I only hope that there is an option for single colour caps.

[Findecanor]

I really like that green one, except for the bottom row legends. The exposed switch bodies look out of place, however.

Having Undo on the backwards Delete key is a big No-No.
Edit: I see now that the original typewriter had a symbol like that.

The bottom row legends: cannon, V2 rocket, the number 8 (?) in some forgotten numerical system, and railway car?

[depletedvespene]

The bottom row legends: cannon, V2 rocket, the number 8 (?) in some forgotten numerical system, and railway car?

Spoiler:

At least the space penis seems to have been quietly dropped.

[Findecanor]

Hmm.. I see now. The exposed switches are a bit weird but it would probably have not looked so weird had the keycaps been skirtless like the original.
I would have made the top level instead of angled, and I think there was a missed opportunity not to put three indicator LEDs on the right border.
If the material is aluminium, I think there was also a missed opportunity to not make it metallic green. A consistent desaturated cyan keycap colour instead of green might also have been more authentic.

[digital_matthew]

Not so much ugly as shoddy:

[Red_October]

[img]https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com ... L1000_.jpg[/img

Card readers on the keyboard? Done. Pen holders? Done. Phone holders? Done. A lighter holder is most definitely a new concept... although it begs the obvious question: where is the cigarette holder?

(don't get me started on the ash tray — I still get mad at the memories of that)

???

My dad was a weapons controller in the Air Force, on a massive system called SAGE -Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a 1950s-era, vacuum-tube driven computer network which was responsible for a great many firsts in computing history: first local-area network (each site had two complete computers for redundancy), first wide-area network (all sites networked together, sharing information in more-or-less real-time), first computer music (it could play Christmas carols on the processor alarm) first inklings of the GUI (it used light guns and you interacted with the radar scope by "shooting" icons), it could even display a naked lady on the scope! It ran at 3MHz, the fastest vacuum-tube computer ever built, took up roughly the same area as a football field (American), and most lived in a nuclear-hardened blockhouse. At each operator's station there was not only an ashtray, but also an automobile-style cigar lighter! My dad still has one of those ashtrays! Along with a few other little items of the user interface; when it was decommissioned in the late 1970s, everyone knicked everything that wasn't nailed down or red hot. Nonetheless, the government realized a profit in the scrapping due to all the gold that it had contained -it scrapped out for more than was paid for it!

Regarding smoking at the terminal in general, I keep a small brush, an "acid brush", used in plumbing, and available for well less than a dollar at hardware stores, in the pencil tray on my Model F so that any errant ash can be brushed away immediately and thoroughly, for any accidents involving spilling the entire ashtray, a Hoover Portapower commercial vacuum cleaner sits plugged in and ready to go at all times behind my desk chair. I'm a slob and I know it, but I'll protect my precious keyboards if I can!

[Elrick]

I concede that the aesthetics of the Hermes Rocket typewriter are an acquired taste.

Everyone first thought the Bel Air Car design were extremely weird when first released, yet decades later they're worshiped as a Classic American Car.

So before you start listening to 'non-designers' about basic aesthetics, consider the current crop of absolute BORING keyboards that wouldn't excite a Catholic Priest in a kindergarten.

Your design is unique and that alone places it way above the avalanche of unexciting and monotonous designs billowing out of factories around the world.

Your keyboard is not that, so I am glad at least something different has surfaced, instead of another boring flat plate keyboard design like Poker, Tada68 or another Whitefox.

[depletedvespene]

(don't get me started on the ash tray — I still get mad at the memories of that)

???

Fine, I can't hold it anymore.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when I was in high school, computers weren't ubiquitous. PCs were VERY seldomly seen outside large businesses, and only a few schools sported expensive "computer labs" composed of a few (at most eight) Atari XL computers (BTW, for some reason, "English" schools had Apple II computers instead). When I was a senior in my high school and generally acknowledged as "being good with computers", I was drafted into a stupid program where we'd go to a certain other school to make classes to the alumni there — three guesses as to what was I supposed to teach.

This particular establishment was a small middle/high school for "problem" kids that had been expelled from all other places in the area — it was as low as you could get before being sent to my country's version of a halfway house; it was even limited to eight kids per class. And, for some reason, they had decided to get a "computer lab" with four Atari 800XL computers (heck, WE were a much bigger school and had only SIX 600XL, not 800XL, units).

The day came. I went there, expecting the eight kids in 9th grade to set themselves up in pairs in front of each of the four computers. The six kids that actually showed up set themselves, instead, in groups of three before two of the computers. "Oh, two don't work anymore!" "Why not?" "The seniors smoke in class and use the cartridge slots as ash trays."

I couldn't believe it. I flipped one of the computers around, opened the slot... and ash (plus other crap) indeed fell to the table. The class went downhill from there (I made the mistake of assuming these idiots would want to learn something instead of simply playing a couple games). I later told the teacher in charge of the program I would not be going there again. That was 30 years ago, and that image of the ash falling down still upsets me.