The mailman brought this today. This is Fun! This keyboard presses all my buttons.
It looks, feels, and sounds like 1993. Nostalgia NIB for $30. Open the box and enjoy it.
I love the retro synthetic click noise. The click noise has a volume knob, but in their wisdom, the designer decided not to let you turn it completely off.
Black ALPS actuate on the high side of the stroke. The tactile point isn't super crisp -- you don't fall off a cliff -- it's more like rubbing marbles together -- like a Cherry brown. I measured 65g on the ripometer. It's fun, it feels like you're doing something, and it's less effort than a Model M at 75-80g.
Side note: That 65g is 11 US nickels and 4 US pennies. A US penny weighs 2.5g -- half a nickel, so you can get higher precision. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Ripometer HD! **fanfare**
The Help, Cancel, Erase, and GL keys send Alt-F? combinations, so you could map them.
The board is well built. The dye sub keys look crisp and high contrast; they have practically no texture. The larger keys are well stabilized, they feel like the smaller keys. The space bar measures at 60g. Good, I don't like extra-heavy space bars.
The layout of the nav cluster is a little weird. Everything is there; you could remap it to be a standard nav cluster. The LEDs are built right into the Lock keys, which is neat, until you realize that you cannot see the Caps Lock indicator while your finger is over the key. Oops. The Wang makes up for this with awesome AMBER colored LEDs, and TEAL legends on the Alt keys and numpad. Otherwise the layout is totally ANSI. The standard keys all report the codes they should.
It's a lovely living artifact of an era gone by.