And the ugly routers, ridiculous keyboards, X-TREEM! OVERCLOCKING! gear like liquid cooling systems, and on and on.
I went into a Best Buy just looking for a cheap, solid full-sized PeeCee keyboard. No lights, no noise, just good, solid clicky keys for a nice price. No bells, no whistles, no attached USB bus.
I’m now hunting for one on eBay instead.
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Wow! 50 Bucks!
Can’t wait to play Crysis at a Starbucks!
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Unicomp still makes IBM model M keyboards. They’re branded differently, of course, but its the same mechanism and made in the same factory. They come in USB now, both Windows and Mac flavours, for around $80-90 US. If you don’t mind the noise, that’s probably the best non-ugly mechanical PC keyoard you can buy. And they are made in America, not China.
Since noise was a factor for me, I searched high and low and at long last reluctantly decided thst my best option was a 25 year old SGI keyboard off ebay.
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So all I’d need would be a PS2 to USB adapter.
I’ve a freaking filing cabinet drawer filled with SGI keyboards. Why didn’t I think of this?
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I think the added the skull back when the internals were the “skull canyon” platform, no idea why that seemed like a good plan; the current generation has a skull just because(‘hades canyon’ is kinda skull-adjacent; but the case is weaker).
SGI had its own proprietary interface that used the PS/2 plug but was not PS/2. Then when they switched to PS/2, they did something weird such that USB adapters that work fine with model M keyboards do not work with SGI keyboards. You will need a “Soarer’s” adapter if the ones you have are actually PS/2:
Not sure what’s needed if you have the SGI proprietary kind.
Yes, this means that there are three kinds of PS/2 to USB adapters: cheap ones that work with modern PS/2 devices but not vintage ones, slightly more expensive ones that work with some vintage PS/2 devices including Model M’s, and even more expensive ones that work with the most finicky vintage PS/2 devices.
Also, that filing cabinet full of keyboards - for the PS/2 ones, if they have Alps switches instead of rubber dome, you can get between $100 and $150 each for them on Ebay. Not sure how much the non-PS/2 ones or the rubber dome ones go for. There are lots of SGI collectors out there, and also quite a few of mechanical keyboard nerds who want a nice quiet Alps keyboard.
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I like my daskeyboard. It seems they no longer have the base model with the unlabeled keycaps.
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