What were your first mechanical keyboards?

ooh I had the same one. I remember thinking the little barrel roller for the volume was awesome (still do really) but that lighting was so obnoxious lol.

First one was a Vortex Vibe that I got around Feb 2019…I was about to get rid of it until I saw the thread where that guy put it into an Apple M0110a case. Now I have two! haha

From there, I quickly spiraled out of control in this hobby. When I first got into this hobby back in early 2019, I really liked the bezel-less keyboards (hence, the Vortex Vibe). But as I started to learn more and more, my tastes quickly evolved and now I’m really into vintage keyboards. So much so that I try to turn my modern keyboards into a sort of homage to old ones lol.

I may offload a few things mid-year because I think I went a bit overboard lol. I’ve already started selling a few of the things that I bought when I first got into this hobby, but since my tastes changed so quickly, I ended up not liking them anymore

SteelSeries 7G with the B.A.E.

I may have used other mech’s before that, but they would have been generic keyboards that were packaged with old Windows 3.1 machines.


This KUL ES-87 was the first mechanical keyboard I brought and is still one of my favorites. I knew I wanted it to be all white once I saw I could get a white case for it. I lucked out early on and bought a set of GMK Stormtrooper from 1up keyboards. This keyboard has been unchanged since then. I’ve bought and sold other keyboards but this will always be a keeper.

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I still have a black Leopold FC200R with Cherry MX Reds I bought back in 2011 or maybe it was 2012. Maybe someday I’ll make time to desolder it but for now it sits on my desk, protected by the plastic dust cover. The legends have faded greatly and the ABS caps have gotten slick and shiny. I replaced the original caps with a set of PBT blanks and it made the keyboard feel new again.

love the look

My first mechanical keyboard is a Cherry G80-2100 (IBM battleship clone from Cherry) with (of course vintage) Cherry MX Black and three Cherry MX Superblack (something like 150g blacks) for the programming keys.

Found it in an electronics dumpster during the 90s (can’t remember when exactly, but probably between 1992 and 1995) and it seemed to have been from a smoker’s office. It couldn’t have been that old as they only started to produce them in the 90s, but the keycaps had to go into the dishwasher first. :slight_smile:

It has German ISO layout and a DIN connector. These are also the reason I don’t use it that often anymore: I works with an DIN-to-PS/2 adaptor, but it only works for two or three seconds if I chain an PS/2-to-USB adaptor behind the DIN-to-PS/2 adaptor. So I can only use it on machines which still have a PS/2 connector. The other thing is that I nowadays mostly use US-ANSI layout.

Nevertheless I only jumped into the mechanical keyboard scene about 2 or 3 years ago. I though was well aware what gem I found back then already for a long time. But I only started to understand in the past few years how exotic these Superblack switches are.

And my first modern time mechanical keyboards were:

  • a Tex Yoda II with Cherry MX Browns and modded with QMX clips, (and due to being replaced with Zilents v2) which is still my daily driver at work; and

  • a Ducky One TKL with Cherry MX Clears and a Tai-Hao double-shot Orange/Black PBT keycap set. It was and occasionally still is my daily driver at home.

(Not counting the KBT ONI TKL with which a friend really hooked me up for that hobby. :slight_smile: Bought the two latter mentioned keyboards afterwards.)

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Now that’s a nice 50%! :slight_smile:

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My first would have been an Atari 800, but that keyboard wasn’t mechanical (though there were variants that were), then an Atari ST (which had an icky keeb as well), but then when we got a Mac, a Quadra 840AV it had an Apple Adjustable Keyboard and somewhere along the way we picked up a nice AEK II (though at the time I didn’t know how good I had it). Later in college friends and I discovered the allure of the IBM Model M and we rescued a few from electronics recyclers. That was my introduction to the expensive hobby rabbit hole.

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