deskthority

Alps 12KC155B

Picked this up alongside a bunch of other vintage computers and keyboards. It appears to be an external version of the keyboard used on a Zenith Z-100 computer, although I can't find too much about it online.
The Board


It's solidly built, with an odd layout. The nav cluster has been merged with the numpad which involves having the arrow keys in the upper right hand corner. There are also many unusual keys such as "fast repeat", "help", "line feed" and even an "f0" key, which were obviously used in the system it was designed for.

It uses a 6 pin RJ11 connector, and I'm currently working on getting it working with a modern machine.

Keycaps and Switches





The keycaps are thick doubleshot and slant away from you. They show virtually no sign of wear, and each keycap is nice and textured, yellowing is unnoticeable as both the inside grey and the outside seem to match.

The switches are Alps SKCC Cream and are an absolute delight to type on, one of the driving reasons for me wanting to convert the keyboard for modern use. The keyboard having seen little use has preserved the keyfeel of the switches quite well and there is absolutely no friction when typing on it.

All in all this keyboard one of my current favourites in my collection.

Care to show some pictures of the vintage computers?

Oh man, congratulations! I've not seen one of these as a separate module before (I suspected that they were made but I didn't find much info on it.) I have one of the modules that comes out of a model that had an integrated keyboard, and I have a board in a similar case but has a different layout. Congrats again and good luck with the conversion process.

The Morrow MDT-60 terminal keyboard used the same case and switches, but with a different layout. The earlier Morrow terminals were by Lear Siegler, but I'm thinking the MDT-60 was by Zenith (I could be wrong about that...). There was a Zenith terminal with a similar keyboard if I'm remembering correctly, but I don't know the model number or if it's the same layout as this one. Truly lovely keyboards; I used one on a Morrow MDT-60 probably 35 years ago and I still remember how disappointed I was when I switched to a Televideo 950 terminal.

User101 wrote: 01 Sep 2019, 07:17 Care to show some pictures of the vintage computers?

Of course! Unfortunately they're in storage right now so I only have some subpar pics I took of them earlier. In terms of keyboards, there's a boring rubber dome samsung, a Datacomp DFK-515AT with SKCL Greens as well as the one labelled in the post. One of the laptops has Futaba MA clickies and the other one (Zenith Supersport SX) has Alps Integrated Domes with nice doubleshot caps.