Congratulations, and good on you for making an old neglected Wang sexy again!
But why are you referring to it as "Vintage IBM 3277 keyboard with internal Micro Switch keyboard assembly"? The seller described it as "1980's WANG PC SCAN PLUS Model 651-1 Scanner & Keyboard". Didn't they know what they were selling? Did IBM really use Hall Effect switches? I never heard of that. Of course, I may just be being an ignorant old Wang here myself.
Hi Ander,
I spotted that IBM keyboard within a few hours of it being posted. The scanner is a Wang and a SCSI one at that but I haven't had a chance to look i over. The keyboard was something that the seller thought might go with the scanner. He had purchased a few items in an estate sale and these were the last two items and thought these might go together. Seeing as the IBM keyboard wasn't marked, he thought it was a Wang also. Page scanners don't come with keyboards, especially when the keyboard is older than the scanner. In this case, the seller didn't know the exact nature of what he was selling. I was expecting Chyros to have known what it was (at least the beam spring variety).
The use of Micro Switch hall effect key switches is a bit of a phenomenon. There is only one other one that I've seen discovered and the theory is this may be the first IBM "industrial" keyboard (minus the gray paint job). Beam spring switches were available at the time (they were patented in 1970 and this is from 1972) but the hall effect switches may have been considered more robust so the Micro Switch keyboard assembly was used internally because it could take harsher environments better than beam spring. Again, this is a theory.
This looks exactly like the beam spring variety but I was able to tell from the pictures that this was a hall effect keyboard and messaged the other owner about it before it arrived; telling him that I found another one. It was a fortunate find and when you posted a link to the auction that I was the only bidder on, I thought I was going to lose it. Thankfully the seller is a "Buy It Now" type seller that put a 10 day auction up because he had no idea what he could get for it (if anything). We figured out a price that we were both happy with and now I have a Wang scanner I need to try to fix
