Muirium wrote:A way around the missing stab problem is to use a smaller cap. Not exactly elegant, but you'll hit close enough centre for sure that way. I should do it on my home made board too, in the meantime.
Ms are excellent boards. I finally scored an SSK just yesterday! There are only two other keyboards I've used which tempt me elsewhere. One is the Model F, the M's own predecessor. Those feel a little different, more metallic as there's more mass in the flip plate at the bottom of the springs I think, and they ping like all hell! Which I like a lot for some demented reason. Here's a sound comparison:
one of my Ms. And my
PC/XT Model F. Same mic and text. If you can make out the space bar sound, that's its stabiliser. My F's is a bit quieter than the M's because the XT has a really heavy space bar (more spring?) which stops you from slamming it down. Another trick I like.
The other keyboard I like even more — my favourite of all time, that I've tried so far — is another IBM: the beam spring. Those were the M's granddaddy. Absolute beasts to look at, but wonderfully smooth to type on, with quite a distinct clicky feel from buckling spring, and quieter too. Another to add to my wish list, as I don't have one of my own. But the shipping!
I don't have any spare caps, but that would be interesting for the space bar, lol. I think I'd be missing it every time!
I know exactly what you mean on the Model F! I actually took typing in high school and was promoted to this elite class of just three of us that used computers instead of typewriters since we were so fast. The F's felt a little lighter to me than the M I was using at home on the 286, and requiring less force for actuation. And it did have that metalic ping! Strangely, I now recall liking that better as well. Somewhere along the way, I felt the F's feel was better, but absolutely hated the layout.
That class was funny as we'd take the assignment and split it three ways, then cut and paste it all together for each of us. We'd be done so early that we spent a good amount of time playing spacewar, lol.
I think I may have used a beam spring at some point in my life. My father was an engineer at Ford and Unisys, and I remember playing with a punch card machine once when I went to work with him. He programmed in a sequence using punch cards for some engineering calculations. Then he fed these into a computer about the size of half a room, which sent it to somewhere else for processing and then printed the results on 132 column green-bar computer paper.
Now that I'm thinking about all this, I know I have a System/36 that was working when pulled out of service somewhere. I wonder if I have the stock keyboard...
The one thing I learned is that the sound of an M is actually related to the key size--enter sounds a bit different, as does space, shift, caps lock, etc.
So it's dead center for me as well. One thing I've always wondered about this though--can you damage the switch from hitting a key on the side without the stabilizer? I try to avoid it anyways, but I've always wondered.
I'm sure that someone will make a controller sooner or later.