The Museum of Keyboards is an online-museum and will offer more and more
information about old computer keyboards soon. At this moment it is still under
construction.
If you see this page captured in frames please click the following link to visit
the
original URL:
http://www.museum-of-keyboards.de/
See bottom of page for copyright and contact details.
As keyboards and related products like
keyboard protectors are my
business I was unlucky enough to keep tons of those dust collectors in my house. I have
at least one sample of each keyboard type we ever sold and many more of those that never
made it into our range.
As already done with parts of my huge collection of old cpu-coolers which is available
in German language as Online-Museum of old CPU
Coolers I intend to take photos of all of those keyboards.
Changes in this area differ significantly from those in CPU coolers:
Visible changes are those towards smaller keyboard cases ("small footprint keyboards")
and additional keys. But the "invisible" changes might be more interesting.
With keyboards becoming cheaper (still waiting for a "buy a burger and get a free PC
keyboard" advertisement) the important changes happened to the inner parts of the
keyboards.
In addition to what happened to standard office keyboards a decrease in price has been
seen for industrial keyboards, too. I do not have more than a few of those. Should
start collecting that stuff, though. With more and more companies avoiding costly
industrial keyboards and buying standard keyboards with flexible keyboard protectors
instead I might have less opportunities to add industrial keyboards to that part of my
collection in the future.
Photos will be taken but this might take some time. Good keyboard photos are much more
difficult to achieve than good cooler photos (at least for non-professional
photographers like me).
In addition to the keyboards I intend to show some things that are older than what we call PCs today (like my old Olivetti and some kind of terminal) because they include a keyboard that needs some dust to be removed anyway. And maybe because I intend to help them make their life being less frustrating.
It might be that I create a section "Others" because I remember more old stuff creeping
around like a CGA monitor incl. card and some CPUs and other chips. And surely there are
printers.
Heck, did I throw away anything?
Somewhere to find is my first harddisk which also was my first open source experience.
It was one of those sticky Seagate HDDs (maybe a ST251 or so) and I had to remove the
cover to get a final backup.
As I never was the proud owner of any room really suitable for that kind of action the
disk surely did not survive the next writing attempt. As the next writing attempt was
after the last necessary successfull reading attempt I did not really care.
Turning it into a closed (non-)source again it made its way onto the shelf awaiting the
dust of time.
Now it looks very much like CPUs won't make it into section "Others" any more.
I decided to have those on a separate site:
CPU History
My German site about old cpu coolers has been mentioned above.
Some time ago I started translating it (still only one page):
Online Museum of Old CPU Coolers
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