Okay, some things I'd like to say about your article. I really appreciate when people write articles, but I don't think this should be the last revision of yours.
General criticism: You're getting nowhere. I honestly don't know what you want to write about. Maybe it's about switches? Maybe it's about keyboards? Maybe it's about the Model M? State this clearly as soon as possible, so your reader knows what to expect.
Occasionally, your facts and figures are wrong. Furthermore, you're too fast when it comes to jumping to conclusions, making whole sections utterly confusing and somewhat silly.
There definitely is potential in your article and just because it contains errors and parts not exactly well-written doesn't mean it's bad overall. As a piece of advice, annoy one or several of your friends to get them into being your proofreaders. While this might not help with factual inaccuracies, it does help when it comes to making a text readable.
Publishing articles on the Internet is quite a pain, so get comfortable with writing an article several times until it's tolerable. I personally love forums for the very reason I don't have to rewrite my posts just because my friends don't like them; but if you want to reach a broader audience, you will have to deal with such things.
Detailed criticism: Your idea of tactile feedback and its origins is inncorrect. Old typewriters had tactile feedback more out of a neccessity than anything else and where an ergonomic nightmare at times. You need to actuate several levers, which more often than not differ in length depending on the key you're pressing, so without an awful amount of thought going into solving this problem, every key will feel different. Old typewriters didn't have the tactility because it's practical, but because it is a direct consequence of driving the type levers and feed directly with just the force of your fingers.
This doesn't mean tactile and auditory feedback is bad; it allows you to know when the switch has registered, which is important for control purposes. Tactility alone allows for stopping or slowing down the keypress motion after the tactile point (which also is the activation point most of the time) in order to not bottom out extremely hard. Tactile feedback is good and very helpful when it comes to inputting stuff, but this is not caused by typewriters having tactility and sound and everyone being used to it, but rather the inner workings of the brain. Switches in cars, for example, are specifically designed for a certain sound and tactility, even if you won't ever type a single word on them.
This makes the following paragraphs seem rather silly. First, there were computers before the 80s, and that's long before. As long as computers or generally anything with a keyboard existed, there needed to be switches for them. I don't know what keyboards for example 60's or 70's IBM mainframes used, but I think they did feature mechanical switches, possibly even tactile and/or clicky--it's not like computer keyboards are the only application where keyswitches are needed; lots of industrial control applications also do.
The Model M is not the first keyboard to feature tactile feedback. It's one of many, many keyboards with tactile feedback and was built in quantities large enough to gather a decent fanbase as well as having an enormously nice feel to it. As far as keyswitch design is concerned, it's extremely simple. Complicated Alps are very interesting switches, but buckling springs are incredibly boring. There were lots of keyswitches in the 80s, as well as there are a lot of keyswitches today. With keyboards being the only input devices (and word processing was not an application you'd get a computer for ("killer application," if this is still an expression used today), as they were extremely expensive, as were printers decent enough to offer readable output), computer manufacturers saw no reason to offer cheap and cheerful keyboards for the masses. The Model M already is a somewhat cheap design, but that doesn't mean it's bad anyway. It's just customers bought quality keyboards, as there was nothing else on the market. The keyboard that "came" (i.e. was sold as a recommended accessory) with the computer could be regarded as being decent and not taken into consideration when actually buying the computer.
With ultra-cheap computers like home computers, this was entirely different, and with an incredibly competitive market, this is why some of the worst keyboards ever were used in home computers; the consumers wanted it as cheap as possible and manufacturers were willing to fulfill this wish.
Plotting the Model M as an industry's-first keyboard is somewhat misleading. It is a nice keyboard, but it's not like there were no nice keyboards before. Using computers as word processors became the rage when they were cheap and versatile enough to replace typewriters, the date of which I'd put somewhere in the late 80's.
Next, your figures are wrong. The Model M has more like 80 cN (or grams, but that's horribly wrong and every physicist in whose presence this is said should beat the offender about the head with a fine selection of authentic 80's keyboards, but that's just my opinion) than your quoted 30 to 40. 80 cN, I might add, is quite a bit. Cherries seem to have around 60 at their tactile point and I don't know anything about Alps, but would see them somewhere inbetween. Topres seem to go anywhere from 35 to 55 cN according to their spec sheet.
The buckling spring's "double click" is not as unique as you'd think. Other switches (MX blues, for example) also click twice, although by far not as pronouced as buckling springs.
Next, I don't think tactility has become less important for computer users--computers just got cheaper and cheaper, giving the incentive for producing cheaper keyboards to go with them. You won't buy a keyboard for too large a fraction of your computer's cost if you're not obsessed with them, know much about keyboards and decide you do need a really good board, or taken in by marketing to embrace the features it comes with, so the only logical conclusion is to lower production cost, leading to cheap keyboards. The rubber dome is inferior to switch designs and everyone knows it, but it ultimately seems like it didn't seem to be too important for most people, leading to the situation we happen to have today.
On to rubber domes: Your notion of them having little to no tactility is quite wrong. Rubber domes to have tactility, but it just loosely correlates with activation characteristics. You do feel a difference in force when you press the key (= tactility!), but you can't tell when exactly the key will fire. I know what you mean, but tactility is the wrong word for this. Linear switches aren't tactile, you press until you reach the bottom and that's it; rubber domes, while not having the characteristics you expect from switches we call "tactile," are in fact tactile, they just feel really crappy.
Talking about my special love, scissor-style keyboards (it's interesting how this expression has come to be used so much; I think the early patents denote them as "pantograph switches"), might I add I find the most unnerving problem to be various debris, hair and dust entering the scissor assembly and turning it nigh unusable? I think this is the biggest disadvantage of scissor switches--they're just so extremely sensitive to dirt of all sorts; before the rubber domes wear out, you've got at least one somewhat sticky scissor switch. I know because I do.
I highly doubt the AAK was the first keyboard with Alps switches, but I don't know, so if you don't want to do the research yourself, I'd suggest using the AAK as an example of Alps keyboards and not as the archetype. It's not incredibly important if it was, though, so you can spare yourself the research and change the wording accordingly.
When it comes to talking about keyboard availability (or generally about availability of a product), it's always nice to add a point of reference, which in your case would be the US. The English-speaking web is large and not entirely US-centric, so writing "Cherry boards are hard to find in the US" is different from writing "Cherry boards are hard to find"--in Europe, for example, about the only thing you'll get are Cherry boards and they are, if I may speak for Germany, somewhat cheap for mechanical keyboards. I won't pass up the opportunity to complain about Cherrys abominably cheap keyboard cases this time, because I never do. They're just horribly, horribly cheap. They keep the PCB in place and carry the model identification sticker, but that's about the only positive thing you can say about them.
Cherry whites are not clicky. They're just tactile. I haven't really figured out Cherry's confusing naming scheme yet, but I suppose "clicky" switches are blues, "linear" switches are blacks, "soft tactile" are whites and "soft tactile, ergonomic" are browns.
That said, I don't think the old Model M's keys require more force. BS already require about 80 cN, anything more would probably feel extremely uncomfortable. Maybe the key feel is different due to studier materials used, but I can't believe there should be differences in activation force (however, I don't know for sure).
I might have missed a few details, but this should definitely be lengthy enough to make the article better if you're so inclined.
-huha
