Reverse engineering a 1985 IBM keyboard (and building a USB converter for it)
Channel: Poking Technology
Date: 2023-02-25

In whch yr hmbl svt attempts to use a IBM 6770 System/40 QuietWriter keyboard dating back from 1985 as a daily driver, which is interesting becaue it's very much not XT or PS/2... and it's got an LCD.

The resulting USB adapter _almost_ works, but since making the video I realised that the keymap isn't quite right as I can't type # or |, plus the G key stopped working again. But I did successfully edit the video using the keyboard! And it's lovely.

See https://github.com/davidgiven/ibm6770keyboard for the resulting code and what I found out about the keyboard specs, plus the output files from the ghidra reverse engineering of the keyboard firmware.