Instead of gaming at the casino or playing the lottery or online sports betting, my gambling vice is taking flyers on cheap off-brand vintage keyboard auctions. Just won this clone of a Wyse ASCII board for $35 shipped. Could be membrane, could be space invader, could be Cherry MX Black, could be F&F. Might not work at all (though that just becomes hand-wiring or parting-out fodder). Just how banana’d is that 10u spacebar? Who knows? No, really… who knows? It’d be nice to find out. 
I have searched the part and model numbers and come up dry with regards to actual manufacturer or switch type, though Boundless in Hauppauge NY is still around. The connector looks like PS/2, but I’m not committing to that. Cleanup, possibly involving retro-bright, which I haven’t done before, and conversion should be an interesting project after my current build wraps up.
EDIT: So, after disassembling (superglue for the plastic clip is drying) this guy ended up being a Costar-OEM’d board from ca1995, so a bit later than I’d assumed. The interesting bit is that the switches are black Alps. Given the date, I assume they’re the “bamboo” type common on Dell AT-101 boards, but in the WYSE 1800ish layout. It’s in pretty good condition, a few rust spots on the switch plate and the grounding/RF plate that takes up the entire bottom of the case. What’s a little less impressive is the keycaps. Typical of Taiwan-made boards of the era, they’re thin ABS in a Cherry-like profile (are they close enough to modern OEM to call them that?), but unlike the Focus boards with vibrant double-shot including colors on the mods, these are printed or lasered and the photograph from the listing is a bit flattering as to contrast. The legends themselves make me feel a lot better about how my own laserin’ experiments have gone; they’re gray and kinda fuzzy. The 10u (9.75u?) space is banana’d a bit and hollow AF, but it works properly, certainly enough that I’m not going to experiment on it. Electrically and structurally, all seems well. The connector is PS/2 and the board basically works fine, just needs the weirdest 10% of stuff remapped.
So, counting this one as another minor win. Definitely worth the price I paid, but no unicorn, and a bit of a project, but a vintage 1800-like has been on my want-list for a while. I’ll have to play around with Hasu’s converter to remap, maybe figuring out how to get the one I have to switch between my usual simple adapter (RCtrl becomes RWin, all else stays as-is) and specialized layouts for this guy and for my rubber dome M122. I may also linearize the black Alps; the scratchiness is real right now, and I’ve heard they’re much nicer that way. I might retrobrite the case, but honestly it’s not that bad, still within the “people might have intended that color” zone, LOL; maybe paint and poly. I will also begin the likely-quixotic quest for a set of WYSE-layout Alps keycaps.
