Yeah from an early price quote I found somewhere I worked out that in adjusted dollars an M was $450 and an F $900! Bizarre, considering today's computer prices.
Yes, it was a large amount of dough for a keyboard. But I guess businesses and serious users realized they'd practically never have to replace them, that they were the last KBs they'd ever have to buy. In this respect, they're like LED lightbulbs, which still cost several times as much as CFL bulbs.
Btw, what does the speaker actually do?
Snowdog933 explained it to me once, as he worked with RS/6000 systems.
These early networks used a method called a
token ring. The computers were connected in a big circle, and empty packets of data, called "frames", were continuously sent around it. When a computer wanted to send a message to another computer, it replaced an empty frame with its data, the target computer's address, and some other required info.
Each computer checked each frame before passing it along. When it got one addressed to it, it changed the frame's "token" byte back to 0 so the sending computer knew the transmission was successful.
If the target computer was offline, a frame addressed to it went around the ring unread. After a certain number of trips (which I think the sys admin could specify), an "error" resulted and the sending computer beeped so its operator knew the transmission had failed.
I don't know why this required a speaker in the keyboard, rather than just using the computer's speaker. Maybe there was a concern that, in noisy environments, the computer speaker wouldn't be heard—so they put one right under the operator's hands.
In any case, that's all the keyboard speaker was ever used for: a simple beep indicating a network transmission error. It's an interesting bit of computing history.
