I just saw one of these on Craigslist. I used one of these for years at my first "real job" and loved it, but wow is it noisy.

In the 90s, my dad and I built custom (higher-end) PCs for small businesses and individuals. We carefully weeded out parts that we didn't like and put a high priority on excellent displays[1], good keyboards and mice[2]. To this day, I'm surprised at how little thought is paid to such a critical input device. And it's not that users don't care about it, it's almost like it was forgotten.

My personal preference, in this category, though was the Northgate Omnikey[0]. It was a multi-platform keyboard that was able to be plugged in to an AT/XT, Amiga and a few others. The model I had was left-oriented F-keys (I miss that!) and included extra keys and tools so that you could put the CTRL where "Caps Lock" was, and "alt" where the left CTRL was, which was how we configured them ... no more accidental CAPS LOCK hits when aiming for "A". Unfortunately, my parents sold it in an estate sale a while back. I doubt they got anywhere near the $100-$200 that these sell for when functional (depending on condition ... most are very yellow due to the plastic oxidizing but you can still find some that maintain their gray-white/blue color). Pretty rare to find a keyboard that resells for about the price they were new (sans inflation).

I'd put the IBM at a very close second. The Northgate was easily on par as far as "feel" was concerned, but the IBM keyboards had this loud "ping" sound that sort-of rang after a key was pressed (springs), which the Omnikey lacked. I couldn't own a keyboard like that if I wanted to continue programming since, at the time, most of my programming[4] was done between midnight and 3:00 AM with fleeting parental approval (fleeting ... if I woke them up).

I feel that keyboard quality is something that manufacturers have missed the ball on -- especially on notebooks. This Christmas I picked out a Thinkpad for my parents. They love it. My Dad now wants a new desktop keyboard, though, because he really likes the Thinkpad keyboard. I was a little puzzled -- his current board feels exactly the same to my fingers. After thinking about it for a bit, I'm fairly certain I know where the problem is: despite the same feel, his desktop keyboard weighs almost nothing. Every time you touch a key, or even reach out for it, it slides a little. So every few sentences, you're re-positioning the keyboard. At my typing speed, this means repositioning the keyboard constantly.

It makes me wonder if in all of this effort to make things lighter and more portable, the industry miscalculated by applying that logic to peripheral keyboards. I'd prefer my keyboard to weight twice as much as my current laptop. To me, I'd rather have a keyboard heavier than a notebook PC. Between the two I use most regularly, one is wired, the other is wireless, both would move with a reasonable gust of wind. Why do I care if it's convenient to carry when it never leaves my desktop? There's much greater value is in it staying put while I use it. At my office, several developers I work with have purchased their own keyboards. Some of it is "cool factor", but one thing I found consistently about the boards they've chosen -- All of them weigh in at 3 times the weight of the typical $15 board and most have sticky rubber feet. About half hadn't realized the difference until I pointed it out. I even had one co-worker that got upset at the realization -- he'd narrowed the choice down to 2 keyboards and opted for the lighter one. I made him unhappy with his decision. Oops!

[0] https://deskthority.net/wiki/Northgate_OmniKey/101

[1] I can't remember the brand, but nearly every computer monitor was XGA 14"; we only sold 16+" and went with Trinitron models and models with similar technology (at the time, I think Sony had an active patent on the technology, but we had quality issues so we switched to a different brand that I assume didn't work exactly like the Trinitron, but still had the color clarity).

[2] We never found a mouse worth a damn -- we experimented with an early model of ball-free mice, but it was trash.

[3] I'm sure there's an intelligent, technical, term for that but I don't care to search for it.

[4] I was writing a BBS from scratch in Borland/Turbo Pascal after deciding to toss out the code from my Telegard hack. I've actually tried to revisit that using SSH as transport (instead of dial-up) but ran out of motivation.