Zenith Z-150 keyboard

[Touch_It]

Friend gave me this for free and I know little about it besides it has (mostly yellow alps on it.











The switches feel really nice. Unfortunately the case is damaged where the power cord comes out and the bottom plate has some corrosion. Also one of the switches is broken and missing the keycap (f10)

If someone smarter than I am can enlighten me with some info on this, it would be much appreciated.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

See this is where Alps starts to get really weird.

The general consensus is that green switches are a bit lighter than yellow (I confirmed this myself with my own switches).

So why would you make the lock switches green Alps, when the rest of the keyboard uses switches perfectly capable of taking LEDs?

I do wonder if it was that only green Alps were manufactured with the LEDs inside originally.

Grey on space bar is of course stiffer.

[jacobolus]

I had another keyboard with green sliders on the switches with LEDs and otherwise yellow switches. The green switches have tall white switchplates (like certain orange Alps switches have), while the yellow switches have short white switchplates. My working hypothesis is that the tall white switchplates are the final few batches of green and orange Alps switches before they switched to short white switchplates and changed the slider colors to salmon and yellow.

[seebart]

that´s a really nice Zenith Touch_It! I bought a ZKB-2 from lowpoly a couple of months ago. I have yet to try yellow Alps. I hope you get your Z-150 up and running.

[Touch_It]

As far as the greens go, sounds like I'm wrong, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying do differentiate in feel, although one of the greens felt stiffer than the other. I would like to restore this but I have no Idea how to get it working unfortunately .

Also forgot to take a pic and mention but most of the keycaps are doubleshot though the plastic seems pretty thin and from the yellowing I'm assuming ABS.

[Muirium]

Yup. Doubleshot almost always means ABS. Only very recently has this been anything other than 100%.

The cable is good old AT / DIN 5. Looks like an ideal job for Soarer's Converter. I wanted that Zenith which Seebart mentioned, because the short right Shift key has a perfect HHKB style Fn candidate next to it. I use Soarer's to play the same trick with my IBM Model F XT.

[Touch_It]

Sweet, I will clean it up and put a teenie on my wishlist. I will check again tonight but the cable didn't fit on my at to ps2 adapter.

[Muirium]

Hmm. Looks like regular AT to me.

[Touch_It]

I thought so too. I will investigate further and provide better photos, for, if nothing else to make the info available for everyone.

[jacobolus]

Yeah, it’s only the earliest Zenith XT boards that have PBT keycaps. I think they switched to ABS doubleshots in 1988 or something, a while before they started using yellow Alps switches (mid 1989?). Usually you can easily pick out the PBT version by noticing a spacebar that’s noticeably yellower than the rest of the board.

Unfortunately the PBT keycap version was before they started putting labels on the back, so there are no dates anywhere (or even model numbers), and I can’t even see anything that looks like a date code on any of the ICs.

I have an ABS doubleshots + green Alps one from May 1988, so they switched to ABS keycaps sometime before that, and switched to yellow switches sometime after that.

[Touch_It]

You cant see the date from the pic I took but this board is from sometime in 1989.

[Touch_It]

Ok yeah it is a standard din5 end on it. Just fits very very snug. In the process of cleaning the keycaps. I should retrobite but I don't have the materials to and want to put money into other projects currently. Wanted to correct myself on the green alps, they are definitely lighter than yellow once I spent a couple minutes actually playing with them.

[seebart]

My ZKB-2 reads August 1987 on the label. I love the "hidden" AT/XT switch compartment. My ZKB-2 has a audio click feature, I don´t know what it´s called. With the metal backplate the ZKB-2 is a very solid keyboard. The metal feet are similair to those on my NTC KB-6151N. As far as I know all Alps SKCL have a notch for the LED, Alps SKCM do not. Green being the oldest of that series. Of course that´s all in our Wiki. I just noticed the LED keycap does not "snap in" when pressing the cap back onto the switch.

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[jacobolus]

Okay, so maybe the PBT–ABS switchover happened in late 86 / early 87. I don’t think I’ve seen a ZKB-2 with PBT keycaps, only Zenith XT boards with those. When is the first appearance of the ZKB-2?

[seebart]

When is the first appearance of the ZKB-2?

I have no idea. The only vintage PBT caps I own are on my obscure mystery board.

Some good pics here:

http://hw001.spaaqs.ne.jp/kaineko2/album20111227.html

Sandy´s got it with different switches:

http://sandy55.fc2web.com/keyboard/keyboard.html

[Touch_It]

Well I cleaned it. I believe it's alive. When I plug it in it beeps at me and the keys with LEDs light up red but nothing happens so it obviously needs a converter. I would need to do some actual typing to confirm but do far not a fan of linear switches. Might sell this bad boy on at some point.

[jacobolus]

Well I cleaned it. I believe it's alive. When I plug it in it beeps at me and the keys with LEDs light up red but nothing happens so it obviously needs a converter.

This is an XT keyboard. Unless you have an old XT PC, you’re going to need an XT to PS/2 or USB converter.

[Muirium]

As good an excuse for Soarer's Converter as I've ever heard! (My IBM XT is a great keyboard and works perfectly with it on USB-only Macs.)

[Compgeke]

Well, you could be like me and just buy an XT or PC but that costs about 4x more and requires about 4x more time to get working properly.

[Touch_It]

The computer gods keep telling to buy a soarer converter but they also keep telling me to buy a solenoid and solenoid board. Tis an expensive hobby lol.

[Muirium]

Computer gods, eh? That's either us lot or the voices in your head. In any case, they're quite right!

Soarer's Converter is something you build for yourself. I got a £4 "Pro Micro" Teensy clone that does the job well, but it's easier to start off with a real Teensy until you know the ropes. It's a fiddly thing to get your head around the first time.

[Touch_It]

Computer gods, eh? That's either us lot or the voices in your head. In any case, they're quite right!

Soarer's Converter is something you build for yourself. I got a £4 "Pro Micro" Teensy clone that does the job well, but it's easier to start off with a real Teensy until you know the ropes. It's a fiddly thing to get your head around the first time.

Both lol. I'm still relatively new to actually modding and haven't soldered in years (I know its not necessary with a bread board). Teensy probably sounds like the better solution for me at this point. More than likely I won't be venturing down this rout for 6 months + though. Home improvements come first and even DIY is expensive.

[gogusrl]

Check out what I have on the way

[Touch_It]

Looks familiar [emoji5]

[seebart]

Check out what I have on the way

nice find gogusrl!

[gogusrl]

It was awesome, I was just looking at this thread a few days ago and thinking "another keyboard I'll probably never touch" and yesterday one of my "WTB old keyboards" threads payed off with this Zenith, 2 x Dell AT101/102 and a Cherry G81-1000HDF.

I was dumb enough to tell him that I'm interested in the Zenith even before seeing the pictures or getting a price from him so he overcharged me for it (~40$ for the Zenith, the 2 dells + cherry = 15$ for all 3).

[jacobolus]

I was dumb enough to tell him that I'm interested in the Zenith even before seeing the pictures or getting a price from him so he overcharged me for it (~40$ for the Zenith, the 2 dells + cherry = 15$ for all 3).

Wait, what? How is that being overcharged? That seems like a fair price on the Zenith if it’s yellow Alps switches, or a bargain for green Alps. (Though judging from the picture the switches might be in bad condition, in which case I dunno what a fair price is.) The Cherry has doubleshot keycaps, right? The MY switches are garbage, but if the keycaps are easily worth $15, especially if unyellowed and not too shiny.

[seebart]

it´s not really overcharging, but gogusrl could have gotten them even "cheaper". It´s still a good deal. On the other hand you never know what condition those old boards are in!

[gogusrl]

I called it overcharging because of the major price difference between the 3 other boards and the Zenith. I got the boards a few days ago, and they're all scratchy as hell (both dells and the zenith). These are my first keyboards with Alps so I got nothing to compare them with but I can't believe that's how they're supposed to feel.

Btw, mine has Green ALPS and some lovely dyesubs (and yes, this time I'm 99% sure they're dyesubs).

[jacobolus]

These are my first keyboards with Alps so I got nothing to compare them with but I can't believe that's how they're supposed to feel.

Definitely not how they’re supposed to feel. If you’ve ever used any type of unmodified (i.e. without extra lubricant) linear cherry MX switch, green Alps is substantially smoother than all of those. “Vintage” MX switches have nothing on green Alps.

I think you can probably mostly restore the feel if you can manage to get the grit out, and optionally add some lubricant. But it’s not trivial to do. The main part that contributes to the scratchiness is the top half of the switch housing. After disassembling all the switches, the best tool to use on the housings would be an ultrasonic cleaner, but you could also possibly remove the dirt by putting them in some kind of mesh bag and blasting them with a DataVac / soaking them in soapy water / swabbing each top housing out with a Q-Tip / some other creative method. The sliders had some kind of lubricant applied at the factory, so if you decide to wash them, you may want to re-lubricate them after.

To be honest, I don’t yet have a method of fixing dirty Alps switches that I’m yet satisfied with, but I haven’t really tried too many things.