Hi everyone!
I've been reading this forum for few weeks now, and I thought it would be time to finally register here. So I'll start with telling something about myself and the keyboards that I have faced this far. I am 16-year old sixth-former from Eastern Finland and you can probably notice it from my English spelling skills
. Anyway I've been interested in computers and that kind of stuff from about 2010, and keyboards have been my greatest interest in past few months. Actually my interest in keyboards started when my friend bought a Ducky with brown cherries and when I tried it once. The feeling of those were quite different from what I had experienced before, but the first try really set my interest up. One of my first operations was to test my very old keytronic keyboard, and sadly I came to the conclusion that it is not mechanical.
After that I began to search some information about mechanical ones, and I read a long article about mechanical keyboards from Finnish computer website called
muropaketti.com. I learnt the basics about mechanicals from there, and so my personal adventure was ready to begin. I started looking for mechanical keyboards with brown cherries from sales, but I never found one cheap and good enough. Afterwards it was just good that I didn't buy a new one, because the brown cherries just weren't the right ones for me.
Then one day my friend told me that his father had a storage full of old computers and old keyboards. He (my friend) had took a working IBM Model M there and he is still using it today. He had also took a very old and strange keyboard, with very strange layout and with strange switches. The days went forward, and my friend told me that he had tested the strange one, but it didn't work. He tried it with my another friend's PC, but it didn't work on it either. The another friend kept the strange keyboard, even though it was not working. The days went forward again, and one day when I visited that another friend of mine, I noticed the old keyboard under his bed. It waked up my interests and I tried it even though it wasn't plugged in and working. I fell love with the "touch" of that one (
) and I asked my friend if I would get it for my own. I told that I could probably fix it, because I'm quite good with fixing broken stuff. My friend told me just not to return the keyboard ever back and so I took the strange keyboard home. I tried the keyboard on my computer, but the num-, caps-, and scroll lock keys were just flashing like the lights of a Christmas tree. I opened the backside of the keyboard and tried to find a sign from the manufacturer, because there was no marks from one at the case of the keyboard. All I found was a mark "Focus FK-747A" from the PCB but google didn't tell anything from it. I left the case open for a night and I started to look for information about the keyboard. I spent a night crawling on the web like a spider, and at the morning I had found a very important piece of information: the switches. The switches were blue alps, but I didn't know if they were real or fake ones. I knew that I would have lots of work with this keyboard.
When I woke up that morning, I put the backside back to its position and plugged the keyboard in. To my surprise, when I turned on the computer, the num lock light lit on. I was quite surprised and I tried to type the password to enter windows. For a greater surprise, the keyboard worked. I managed to log in to windows, and I made some typing tests. The keyboard worked fine, and all the keys were working. I was out of my mind, because I had managed to fix a broken vintage keyboard which I had had for free. I told my friend (the one who told me to NEVER give it back) that the keyboard was working again, and he got mad. He wanted the keyboard back, but I didn't give a ****. I managed to keep the keyboard after some arguing and payment (20 euros..) and I am still using it nowadays, in fact I'm typing with the keyboard right now.
So that was the story how I got my first mechanical one, which I'm still using and which I'm still in love with. I've been doing some research, and I managed to verify that these switches really are genuine blue alps. I have also tried to find a sign from the manufacturer, but the only thing that gives a very little advice is the "focus 747-a" mark at the PCB. The research goes on.
Anyway I have lots of thing to tell about this keyboard, but I won't tell anymore of them right now. I'll probably start some new threads on other sections of this forum later this week, but I canīt help telling you about the result of this nights researches: Genuine blue alps switches can be easily turned from clicky to linear, and the experience is something very new, at least for me
. I have not found out that anyone had invented this before, but I may not be the first one who has done this.
Phew, muchas textos (
?). I am already sorry about my grammar errors and mistakes, but I hope you can see the point from my posts
.
- nappi11, the very new one here
edit: fixed typos and stuff which were made by alcohol
