deskthority

Here are some pictures of an IBM 5322 System/23 Datamaster computer that I acquired recently. Sadly, it needs a little work and can certainly use a refinished barrel plate but I've made a post the wiki and will present the pictures here as well.

I'm not sure if this is unique but the capacitive hammer plates have a "dimple" at the end curved toward the bottom that appears to make contact with the capacitive PCB; leaving a gap so that the whole hammer plate doesn't slap the PCB on key press. I haven't seen this in other Model Fs that I recall. I also note that the hammers appear to feel cold to the touch as if they were more metallic than the normal Model F hammers from the IBM PC XT keyboards. I had to double check that they were not completely metallic. Perhaps this accounts for the gap in that it will still actuate the capacitive circuit even though it doesn't make full contact?

Anyway, here are some pics:

Who glued an XT to that terminal?

How do the keycaps compare to XT ones?

Very nice suci, thanks for sharing. What does this "puppy" weigh? 15 Kilos?

alh84001 wrote: How do the keycaps compare to XT ones?

The legends are super sharp but the camera didn't focus well enough on them. You can also see a slight bit of dirt on the "C" key. This is because the key cap tops have a slightly rough texture and they were difficult to clean. I don't recall if I've ever seen the extra plastic corner stabilizers on the underside of the key caps before. This keyboard has a mixture and there didn't seem to be a pattern.

seebart wrote: Very nice suci, thanks for sharing. What does this "puppy" weigh? 15 Kilos?

Haha.That is funny. Shipping weight was 107 lbs or about 48 kilos. You were just a little off The dual 8" floppy drives adds probably half of the weight.

seebart wrote: Very nice suci, thanks for sharing. What does this "puppy" weigh? 15 Kilos?

Haha.That is funny. Shipping weight was 107 lbs or about 48 kilos. You were just a little off The dual 8" floppy drives adds probably half of the weight.[/quote]

Damn. 48 kilos. You need a fork lift for that.

I love the stepped Backslash/Pipe key. It looks small but I suppose that it is the standard 1.25u size.

And that center stepped CapsLock with legend of down arrow above the Left Shift with up arrow is great, too.