deskthority

Because of a thread here I stumbled across this keyboard on ebay and due to its reasonable price I decided to pick the last one up. Just out of curiosity, treasurehunting instincts and of course....because of science!

This keyboard belongs to the Philips PM 3655 Logic Analyzer! I have no idea for what it was used and what was being logically analyzed with it. But the whole system looks like this:



It comes with some nice QWERTY layout, lasered keycaps, a "logic" labeled case and plate mounted cyan Omron switches. According the PCB its was build in 1988 by Focus Electronics (FK-767). Here some more pics:

Nice looking keyboard, is it as heavy as it looks?

no, its not that uber-heavy, I would say. The upper case/front is out of metal, the brown lower case is out of plastic and the plate is an aluminium one. So more or less its normal weight like any modern fullsize mechanical keyboard. It just looks heavy because of the quite big case, which has no other function than being big, as you can see. Plate and PCB could have been constructed in a smaller case, but seems it was able to be connected to this Logic analyzer computer (there some connectors on the side of the case) and therefore it might need to have some certain dimensions.

Great looking board!

Nice to see that some of my finds aren't crap!

Oh and you should take a closeup of the switch and post it here: http://deskthority.net/wiki/Omron_keyswitch

yep, it was yr link rodtang. will see if I can disassemble one of the switches and make some photos soon.

Seems it also acted as the front lid of the whole box.

Jmneuv wrote:Seems it also acted as the front lid of the whole box.

Same as the IBM portable computer. That keyboard also has an aluminium backplate and all plastic case.

Yes, youre right. So the label on the backside just makes sense than.

Ah. I was wondering about some of the more interesting FK-* product numbers that Focus registered with the FCC.

I wonder now whether that was ever sold as a separate keyboard — I presume not.

Would you say that those blue Omrons are cyan, or deep sky blue? These are the cyan ones in an FK-555:

http://sandy55.fc2web.com/keyboard/fk555_om.html

The cyan ones are clicky — yours too?

I would say these are the cyan switches. At least they are not deep blue, more of a light blue. And they are clicky, yes.

There are again 2 more of these keyboards on ebay. Just 6 EUR for some nice Omron switches.

http://www.ebay.de/itm/Antik-Nostalgie- ... 35c577c34e