Hi folks, It's taken me some time to work out why this topic tends to trigger the reaction in me that it does. Unfortunately, in my experience... well, a lot of people who don't care about vintage computing still have a vague concept that other people sometimes want the things, even when they can't for the life of them fathom why such a thing would be true. If they recognize something as being extremely out of date, they might decide to not scrap it out of hand, in case somebody actually wants it for some reason. A keyboard, on the other hand, tends to prompt a very different set of relfexes. They've been more or less commodity hardware for long enough that if a non-retrotechie can't figure out how someone would plug it in, they're more inclined to view it as useless junk (and immediately discard it) than as something that weirdo up the street with all the old electronics in his garage might be interested in. Most people's default mental clutter-filtering algorithm will default to treating the two types of artefact as categorically different, generally with a very different default range of disposal options coming to mind. Of course, it doesn't help that "daily driver" keyboards have usually been inherently higher-wear items in their era than whatever old clunker one might have spent umpty-seven years plugged into, so fewer of them tend to have survived this long in the first place... even when in relatively good custody (i.e., somehow not accidentally separated from the intended host hardware, despite the whole works having repeatedly been {hurriedly boxed / accidentally placed crookedly under heavier items in a "temporary" stack that took 15 years to get around to / expediently stuffed into out-of-sight storage areas before the family neat-freak Gets Unfortunate Ideas about them / abruptly relocated by poorly-suited vehicles, under varying degrees of last-minute desperation / repacked with hopes of the box surviving longer this time} over a span of 20-50 years or more). In summary, I personally consider it a minor miracle deserving of at least a little awe (and, situationally, perhaps even some level of formalities to one's Higher Power of choice) when a very old keyboard, or similar highly-vulnerable bit of peripheral retrotech, is found intact. Naturally, this is only my personal two cents' worth of overly wordy waffling; if any of you have had better luck with such hardware, I congratulate you with at least as much generalized relief for our hobby in general as I do with unhealthily intense envy (*grin*). Seek on, friends, they've not all been lost yet! Gordon S. > On Jun 22, 2022, at 1:26 AM, silverdr_at_srebrnysen.com wrote: > > >>> Hello allemaal, >>> I recently gave one of my rounded PETs for restoration >>> https://www.facebook.com/SMOKPL/photos/1353620988449797 >>> (Ruud might remember it :-) to a friend who's running a museum in >>> Opole as well as organises "Moonshine Dragons Party" and generally >>> does tons of great work around retrocomputing. Unfortunately I don't >>> have keyboards for those PETs. Any chance that someone might have one? >>> For sale? >> >> On 2022-06-21, at 06:33, ruud_at_baltissen.org wrote: >> >> The ones I have are all paired with a computer. > > Roger. I know it's a long shot, but at least I tried... I currently have a number of computers w/o keyboards so maybe out there is a number of keyboards w/o computers, both groups longing for each other ;-)Received on 2022-06-25 06:00:03
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