GOBsmacked by Gorgeous Old Boards

I haven’t decided if this SAM Coupé (ca1990) is a Gorgeous Old Board, or a Gratuitously Odd Board. Maybe it’s both.

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Bet that palmrest gets hot

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Bonus hand warmer :laughing:

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Going vertical was an interesting choice in the waning days of the integrated keyboard, but it really does look like what it is, a keyboard tossed on top of a computer. Looks like it was a membrane using Alps sliders (or at least Alps stabs, based on the space in the video I saw). Being an 8-bit British machine, of course there’s a niche enthusiast scene, and they’ve done mechanical replacements.

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That is so awesome and funny to see someone had already done so.

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I would wager that most of the more popular retro machines whose architecture supports it have at least one mechanical conversion project hiding on Github or (more likely) buried in their dedicated forums. The keycap customization options these days could really be a godsend for their aesthetics if they know about them.

I don’t have the patience to really continue hunting right now, but the SAM may have Cherry sliders, based on the seller noting they could reuse their keycaps. I definitely saw the tongue of an Alps spacebar slider insert peeking out on a repair video I fast forwarded through.

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Here are a couple of 4K wallpapers I created by using an image upscaling tool on screenshots of chyrosran22’s videos.

EDIT: ah, I see posts limit image resolution. Here is a link.

^ Mycro-Tek MC-12000-5

^ Chyron 4044

If we’re talking purely looks, I think Key Tronic made some of the most beautiful keyboards ever in the late 70s and early-to-mid-80s. These three always put a starry look in my eye (unfortunately I have no closeups of the Sycor, it’s from an eBay listing):

Chyron 4044 (top-left)
Mycro-Tek MC-12000-5 (bottom-left)
Sycor 351 (right)

For me, the magic has something to do with the combination of those glossy, rounded deep-dish keycaps with the enormous bezels.

Honorable mention for the Dasher D1, which also came with glossy (well, semi-glossy) deep dish keycaps with very rounded corners.

The upscaling didn’t work quite as well here as with the other two, it created some thin black contours around the legends.

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