There are many unusual keyboards (can be found easily on Google).
I recently saw this medical keyboard, captured from the German documentary 40 Jahre Aids - Wir leben noch.
Probably ~1985 in Berlin. I can’t identify the brand.
Today’s medical keyboards rather look like regular keyboards, most have one or more dials. There are also waterproof membrane keyboards and steel keyboards.
Any other keyboards for medical or other purposes with many keys? (Except for a sound studio or mainframe panels).
I also found this interesting commissioned soviet style keyboard with military connectors, dual switch safety system, 2x3 lamps and green keys (but with not that many keys). Gallery, best is the last animation
Regarding keyboards, Marcin Wichary (known for great computer history related photos) has been working on a book about keyboards for a while now. There may be some interesting photos on his Flickr stream and albums.
Famously, the chorded keypad that came as a complement to the mouse (with NLS), was a binary Baudot input (one bit for each finger – you can’t do this with ASCII).
You might have disagreed with some of Raskin’s user interface philosophies (Steve Jobs certainly did, and fired Raskin from the original Macintosh team) but they were always interesting. Raskin’s Leap Keys in the SwyftWare/Canon Cat systems were clever indeed.
The story I have always heard was that when Steve appointed himself as the new Macintosh boss and started taking it in a “mini Lisa” direction, Jef got angry and quit. That is different from being fired.
Many years ago, I used to work in a commercial graphics outfit, as a typesetter, using then-new-fangled computerized typesetting equipment. Mine was a CompuGraphic Editwriter 7500, and I got pretty good at flying around the four “outrigger” keypads, which had controls for selecting font size, face, adjusting spacing, and dynamically re-setting line leading and so forth.
Picture from a printing museum website, apparently from Belgium, but these machines were very common in the small-batch photo-typesetting world in the 1980s.
Interesting that the keyboard is visually less impressive than I remember it. Still, very niche and special-purpose.
I found this very rare keyboard, recently sold on ebay (10 bids, 38 GBP).
From Troy Systems Limited (Wembley). https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?f=66&p=503560
There are some more close-up photos on ebay.
Not just the amount of keys and the alignment, but also the functions are interesting. And there’s a quite large display.
On enter, there’s also XMIT transfer function. Others include
Deal 2000, bid, offer, Tele-rate, … Maybe for a horse race betting computer. There’s even a horse as logo.
Hi,
I’ve installed this type of keyboard in the past (year 2000).
It was used in trading rooms (banks, trading platform, exchanges..). The keyboard is composed of well .. the keyboard in this picture, connected to a box that allow interfacing with different trading systems (Telerate, Reuters, Bloomberg, Cqg…). The LCD display allow to see what function the various specific keys are configured for (depending on the choosen system). It was possible to configure macros, user specific rights… The box connected to the keyboard can also be used to switch video source (on the selected system) via VGA (RvBs).
This stuff costs around £1500 to £2000 depending on the configuration. The keyboard was in metal and weight some Kgs. Was a nightmare to configure too (they can be chained).
It is not possible to use it with a Pc even if you have the interface box. You needed a sort of licence code to activate it.
