deskthority

My latest acquisition. A vintage 1977 Key Tronic, with modular foam'n'foil linear switches.
I've been trying to get one of these for a while, but ebay snipers seem to be on the hunt for them...

Not as neat as my previous find, but interesting nonetheless. And now I have access to switch pics of a vintage Key Tronic



















Something else is arriving tomorrow. This one "could" be extremely interesting (or not...).

I had a Unisys version of something like that. I threw it out because it was so degraded. The keycaps broke when you pressed on them. Shame, it was a good looking board. I've never seen any keyboards prior to the 1980's in Australia. You are very lucky.

Congratulations! There was a similar one at ebay.de some weeks ago, but I did not want it much enough.

My own 1977 Key Tronic is a bit younger than yours (12/1977)

Thanks for opening the switch, so I know how mine look inside.

Jesus that MX switch really gives a sense of scale to these bohemoths..

[Account and posts deleted on request]

Group buy for "tty lock" keys!

002 wrote:Jesus that MX switch really gives a sense of scale to these bohemoths..

Only if you know how big an MX switch is. Since I’ve never seen one in the plastic, I’m still in the dark.

Ahaha. Happy keycap is happy:



That is so my new avatar.

What's up with the space bar? It's seems to be hanging a little low in there...

rindorbrot wrote:What's up with the space bar? It's seems to be hanging a little low in there...

In my pic above, the spacebar spring wasn't properly seated.

This pic shows the actual spacebar height.

Oh, and that TTY Lock key 7bit. Is there an LED in there?

If there is, I demand pics!

dirge wrote:Group buy for "tty lock" keys!

Here you go----->Round 4

Look for SPH/FUNCTION and ROUND3/FUNCTION.

HaaTa wrote:Oh, and that TTY Lock key 7bit. Is there an LED in there?

If there is, I demand pics!

There is no LED but a real lamp!

7bit wrote:

HaaTa wrote:Oh, and that TTY Lock key 7bit. Is there an LED in there?

If there is, I demand pics!

There is no LED but a real lamp!

Pics! (this deserves a thread of its own for awesomeness)

I don't know. Foam and foil feels pretty shitty.

looking good. Now I know how foam and foil looks like. Thanks for posting

man, that black layout is perfect. it looks like it's made out of bakelite. blue one is nice too.

Fascinating. This must be the original design of the Key Tronic foam & foil - no metal plate and square sliders. I've got a Key Tronic foam & foil from 1979 and the PCB is the same (round capacitive pads) but it has a metal plate and round sliders.

Notice how the foam pads on these disintegrate. It seems to always happen on the ones with brownish pads. When they changed the design in 1981 ("butterfly" shaped capacitive pads), they also changed the foam pads to a green material that doesn't disintegrate. I have three of these keyboards, (1982, 1983 and 1989) and none has even a single damaged foam pad. So the bad reputation of disintegrated foam must be from the earlier design brown pads.

Key Tronic certainly improved their design with the post-81 "butterfly" version. Besides the pad improvement, the PCB much better constructed. It's beautiful. When I disassembled my 1989 keyboard, I expected to see late-80's cost cutting, but I almost gasped at the beauty of it. (probably one last bit of quality before the horrible 90's came along to ruin everything)

By the way, this is a Sanders 8170 keyboard.


The earlier Sanders 720 (as seen in the header) used Micro Switch.