So this guy came home with me.
Sanders Associates was a defense contractor out of Nashua, New Hampshire, which is about twenty minutes by car away from me. They worked on projects like radar systems and missile guidance and other high-speed low-drag stuff. I have it on good authority that they had one of these keyboards, possibly this exact one, set up as a sort of demonstrator where they were able to move the keys around to different layouts to mock up what the client had asked for. Having a look inside seems to support this idea:
Hand-wired with three different kinds of wire, and a lug which has obviously had something attached to it but does no longer. The case has an attachment point for a jack, but instead a ribbon cable trails out with a DA-15 on it. It's not very long, perhaps a foot, and there's absolutely nothing to act as a strain relief.
I'm not
sure it's a demonstrator; it could just be a hackney`d repair or a keyboard someone re-purposed for another system entirely, but either way it's really fascinating because it's an artifact from another time. This thing was designed, and maybe built, in the 60s. It's entirely metal, and the switches are Micro Switch magnetic reed switches, really complicated affairs with a real smooth feel. I only realized after I had taken the card out of the camera that I forgot to make photographs of the keycaps and stems and suchlike; the caps are exceptionally thick and double-shot, but they're not going to be compatible with much of anything, because they've got a metal spike that goes down into the tubular stem of the switch. The spike is set in a fat cruciform socket that would probably fit Honeywell Hall Effect switches, in fact my Burroughs TP110 has caps which have a slot for such a spike. I don't know yet if the spike is non-destructively removable, and I don't intend to destroy anything to try, but it didn't pull out easily with a pliers.
