These things are New In Box from 2013. Here's a box with a board in it.
Here's the board ready to go.
Immediately, I'm noticing a few things.
1: The key caps. They look kind of cheap and wonky. Look at this.
Big fat mold markings? Well, if the mold was solid and smooth maybe that would be all right, but look at these two images.
And, the writing is kind of blurry, like the people used to say all the time. But, that's only true on some of the keycaps, and on some of the keyboards. It seems to do this at random. Look at these legends.
Now look at the key I pulled off of another keyboard in another box. It does seem to vary even within keyboards built on the same day.
2: The case. It's got a bunch of weird marks on it, plus strange dents and molding issues. I also noticed that it's actually pretty much just a Lexmark case and Lexmark internals, cheapened a bit.
If we look at the side of the board, the old Unicomp has the same late IBM build, and it has the drainage holes.
The NEW Unicomp doesn't have a thick thing of plastic there, and it doesn't have drainage holes, even though the case does. They've just made the inside more open. Look.
The plastic covering over the membrane which holds the barrels is fundamentally a late IBM design on the old Unicomp, but all ****ty.
Unicomp now uses a different plastic design over the membrane. In fact, you can still see the membrane there.
Anyway, let's get to the board itself. It is a black 101 model that uses PS/2 and has a magnetic stripe reader. The reader turns on when plugged into the computer.
The keyboard, on the other hand, does nothing.
It looks like this controller thingy goes to the MSR, then the MSR goes out to the PS/2 port.
I tried a few things to get it to work. I whipped out my new Unicomp, and started plugging stuff in to see if it would work. The black keyboard wouldn't talk through the new one's cord, and the new one wouldn't talk through the black one's cord.
I guess I got the keycaps though.
So, anyway, does anyone recognize this? Will a Soarer's converter help? Does anyone see a reason that might not work? Is it easy to train a Soarer's based on this? My experience with those is they basically just ****ing work, so I don't know how to handle it if it doesn't.
