[Coco] Mechanical keyboard upgrades for the CoCo

[Kandur]

Way back in the day, actually in the early 70's 
I bought my very first keyboard, a surplus Cherry  keyboard.
It was beautiful, great feel and travel, quiet but positive clicks,
the keytops looked like  shinny black jewels, with molded in, large white letters.
It was an ASCII keyboard, like most of the surplus keyboards those days.

The only reason I would spend big bucks for new mylars, etc.
or drop in Coco keyboard clones, if I wanted to sell my Coco,
as a "100% working, original, unmodified" Coco.
Other then that, I would prefer to use an off the shelf,
inexpensive USB or PS2 keyboard, with an interface, 
that plugs into the Coco's keyboard socket. 
This may even work with a KVM switch to share it with 
my PC's present, well placed keyboard.
Haven't looked yet, but sure such an interface could be had,
for far less then the $200, $300 prices bandied about here.

Kandur


Thursday, August 20, 2015, 11:46:03 PM, you wrote:
> The discussion of producing new mylar sheets has gotten me thinking... Way
> back in the day, I recall drooling over fancy keyboard upgrades for my CoCo 1
> that were advertised in Rainbow Magazine. If I recall correctly, they were the
> HJL-57 keyboards. I didn't have any money, and I couldn't talk my dad into
> buying one, but they sure looked nice compared to that hard chiclet keyboard.

> Has anybody considered manufacturing new mechanical keyboard upgrades for the
> CoCo family, perhaps using the popular Cherry MX series keyswitches? I expect
> that it would be prohibitively expensive, and I doubt that the entire
> remaining market for such a thing would be large enough to get the cost down
> even to the range of high-end gaming and programmer keyboards, which can run
> well over a hundred bucks. But maybe I'm wrong about that, and talking about
> the topic for a bit might be fun anyway.

> So, what do y'all think? I'd enjoy replacing the mushy-feeling keyboard in my
> CoCo 3 with a set of clicky Cherry MX blues, even if only in my imagination.


> Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
> http://www.nf6x.net/