Thread necrophilia!
I have spent a lot of time cleaning up these Alps keyboards, and have had something of a 180° opinion change about Alps in general. White ALPS, with a little bit of silicon grease on the sliders, compare quite favorably with my Filco (cherry blues). I'm rather appreciating the lack of hysteresis in the switch, and the lower-pitched click. Not
quite as smooth as a cherry, but close. Still, it is an incredible time sink to open and clean 101 keys.
It has also become clear to me that white alps and blue alps are basically identical. still, blue is cool looking:
Unfortunately, my AT101W with blue Alps is on the fritz. Whole sections of the boards aren't working (i.e, the 4,5,6,3 and del key on the numpad). I'm not so sure how much more work I want to put into it.
In the meantime, my Filco has been sitting in a corner all this week, replaced by this wonderful thing:
Cleaned inside and out, with cleaned and re-lubricated white alps. It feels
great to type on. The keys are awesome too: double shot, multi-color.
Build quality is quite good. The bottom half of the case is steel. The soldering is very consistent on the PCB. And, to my surprise, full NKRO.
I have no idea what sort of keyboard this is. The manufacturer is "Reason Technology", and the model number is simply "101". I couldn't find a date anywhere. It uses an AT connection, so it's probably fairly old (it WAS in the same lot as all my other Model Fs). Huh.