Wang Model 2236 Terminal Keyboard
Posted: 05 May 2021, 23:16
Got lucky and snatched this beauty of a board on eBay. It came in my mail yesterday, well packaged but quite dirty.
I love the color scheme and especially the red "HELP" key.
That white thing to the left of TAB is actually a locklight which indicates the status of shift.
The function row on the top consists of relegendable keycaps.
The switches are MicroSwitch SD series. Those caps are the real deal but everything is smugded with some sticky, black dust and the plate also has seen better days. Seems to be blued rather than painted.
Switches are mostly very scratchy and need to be cleaned. Hope I figure out how to do this since they can't be opened and all I heard so far was that those are therefore a pain to get clean. The Enter key and the numpad 0 have suffered quite much from some kind of heat damage. The surface is all warped and on the Enter key you can even see parts of the white doubleshot frame, around which the grey plastic was molded.
Some of the switches seem to be bolted right to the pcb. Here you can see the little, very rusty nuts on the backside.
Also at the back of the pcb is...
a Solenoid! That's going to be lots of fun, should I ever get this thing working properly
After a little bit of detective work I found out this keyboard module once belonged to the "WP-Edition" of the Wang Model 2236 Interactive Terminal. The original ribbon cable was included and directly plugs into the back of the board.
So far I couldn't find any documentation of the pinout, unfortunately. But I'd really like to build a case for it and get this thing working again. I don't really know how I should determine the pinout without a logic analyzer, but maybe some of you can help me out with this. Were there maybe already conversion attemps with a similar board?
Sorry for the at best mediocre image quality, as usual
- IMG_20210504_160222.jpg (1.48 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- 22.jpg (71.76 KiB) Viewed 2385 times
- IMG_20210504_160317.jpg (1.24 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
I love the color scheme and especially the red "HELP" key.
- IMG_20210504_160356.jpg (2.24 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- IMG_20210504_160436.jpg (1.94 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
That white thing to the left of TAB is actually a locklight which indicates the status of shift.
- IMG_20210504_160634.jpg (3.16 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- IMG_20210504_161900.jpg (2.32 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- IMG_20210504_161923.jpg (2.85 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- IMG_20210504_161103.jpg (3.44 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- IMG_20210504_161651.jpg (3.4 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- IMG_20210504_162418.jpg (3.76 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
Switches are mostly very scratchy and need to be cleaned. Hope I figure out how to do this since they can't be opened and all I heard so far was that those are therefore a pain to get clean. The Enter key and the numpad 0 have suffered quite much from some kind of heat damage. The surface is all warped and on the Enter key you can even see parts of the white doubleshot frame, around which the grey plastic was molded.
- IMG_20210504_160416.jpg (1.71 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
- index.jpg (57.93 KiB) Viewed 2385 times
Some of the switches seem to be bolted right to the pcb. Here you can see the little, very rusty nuts on the backside.
- IMG_20210504_162521.jpg (1.05 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
Also at the back of the pcb is...
- IMG_20210504_160311.jpg (3.58 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
a Solenoid! That's going to be lots of fun, should I ever get this thing working properly
After a little bit of detective work I found out this keyboard module once belonged to the "WP-Edition" of the Wang Model 2236 Interactive Terminal. The original ribbon cable was included and directly plugs into the back of the board.
- IMG_20210504_162531.jpg (2.86 MiB) Viewed 2385 times
So far I couldn't find any documentation of the pinout, unfortunately. But I'd really like to build a case for it and get this thing working again. I don't really know how I should determine the pinout without a logic analyzer, but maybe some of you can help me out with this. Were there maybe already conversion attemps with a similar board?
Sorry for the at best mediocre image quality, as usual
! 
