Buckling Springs

In pursuit of simultaneous his’n’hers internet access, my wife and I bought a second desktop machine at El Giganten a couple of months back. It’s an ugly-looking but relatively inexpensive (and adequately well-specified) Packard Bell ‘ixtreme’ model.

One part of it that wasn’t adequate, however, was the keyboard, which must be one of the flimsiest and nastiest I’ve ever laid my hands on. We returned to the same store and perused their stock, which afforded a fairly limited choice of Logitech and Microsoft models. My wife asked which of them I liked best at which I prodded glumly at a few keys on each of the displays and complained that I didn’t really like any of them very much, and that ‘they don’t make keyboards like they used to.’ We left with a Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pro set, which, to be fair, was at least a good deal better than the keyboard it was meant to replace.

My curmudgeonly outlook on the subject stems from the fact that I’ve been using computers just long enough to recall with fond nostalgia the metallic click-&-clack of those beige keyboards that often accompanied beige ’80s PCs. And whilst PCs have been improved since then in almost every other respect, it seems to me that the quality of keyboards has, conversely, deteriorated.

Seeking to recapture some of that retro keyclick feel, I discovered that a company called Unicomp in fact do make keyboards like they (specifically IBM), used to. I ordered one of their ‘customiser’ models, with a British layout, refreshingly free of all those extra keys you never needed in the first place, and, most importantly, with what I now know is termed a buckling spring key action, the source of those telltale clicks and clacks.