IBM industrial Model M video tour

A video tour of my industrial Model M, hope you enjoy, and let me know if you know more about it :) . So far, I'm assuming it's a very early-production part 1388032.

[shivkishanupadhyaya]

I never realized how much I loved vintage keyboards until I found this channel

[antoinefdu]

Chyrosran22, I'm glad there are people like you to take care of such beauties. I wouldn't want it to be left to rot in an attic somewhere.

[sambalsamurai]

5:13 no body has EVER talked so thouroughly about bolts in any industry ever before :D

[MHX_Neckbeard]

13:00 definitely makes it look like a prototype, that appears to be an EEPROM chip with a protective sticker over the UV-hole. I don't know much about Model Ms but on Arcade machine PCBs those were only used for prototyping since they are erasable, and were repaced by conventional ROM chip on production boards. if you need to know more about electronics or PCBs I suggest asking YouTuber lukemorse1 he's an american living in japan and also a PCB god

[lemmmmmmmmm]

I'm a little late to the party here and I'm not sure if you've figured it out yet, but I wonder if this was thrown together for a trade show of sorts? Maybe they were still prototyping this board and had to debut it at a trade show, so they took one of the prototypes, painted it, scavenged spare parts to make it all work and then put it out at the trade show for potential buyers to see and consider buying for their factories.

[woodyofp]

Maybe somebody working at IBM put it together one piece at a time, getting the smaller parts home in their lunch box, and the larger parts in their friend's mobile home.

[Ambassador_Kobi]

I worked on these keyboards, there were also models with a trackpoint integrated between the keys.

[Pauleh]

I'm pretty sure that the Lexmark PCB is different from the regular IBM PCB, so that may be a bad comparison. Very interesting tho. Lovely find!

[greyareaRK]

This remains my idea of keyboardness. I had a knock-off of this WAY back. Loud but solid.

[rockerito]

I enjoyed this video a lot! That's a sexy keyboard. So envious, it makes my beloved '95 Model M (on which I'm typing this) look meh. Great video!

[lovesnakeden]

*_"Pick up some milk... Now, where is that? Here it is!"_*

lol Your voice reminds me of The Postal 2 Dude. :")

[RubySapior]

OMG how did you get your hands on a 1388032!
You cant even find them on the market anymore. I was only able to find 1390120 which is like $300+ in decent condition. Ive been looking for a 1386303 board, and my search is still ongoing :)

[MD-wqon]

I sure miss typing on those beast keyboards. They were tanks!!!

[turbo]

The legs on the oscillator are likely there to shield it from the soldering heat, assuming they used a dip/wave soldering process.

[gencreeper]

Something tells me this was rebuilt somehow. I know Unicomp has the 2 piece keys. Strangest thing to me is the insert and delete key symbols (they look similar to two keys on the beam spring keyboard you reviewed? Wonder if this was partially handmade either from junk as a cost saving method or to perform a specific strange function. One thing I'm curious about is if the top panel is also painted

[gavincurtis]

The "newer" PCB has an oscillator too. It's the 3 pinned blue jellybean looking part at the lower right of the Lexmark PCB, just under the chip at the edge of the circuit board. Ceramic resonator. The chip itself on the original board with the tape is probably a UV erasable programmable microcontroller. Since this was a custom keyboard of low production number, they opted to use the expensive ceramic reprogrammable windowed part instead of bulk mask Rom programmed plastic encapsulated IC. That empty space without parts could be for data acquisition/signal conditioning if the unit had a track point nub perhaps?

[Xengrii]

Such a nice keyboard, I would love to have one myself. Can you tell me from where do you get so many mechanical keyboards in such a great condition? Where I live (Not in the US or any english speaking country) there are very very few old mechanical keyboards for sale, and if there is any, they are in horrible conditions. Thanks.

[wobbled]

I'm wondering if someone put this together from spare parts? That'd explain the different keycaps, and the different LED overlay sticker for Numlock, scroll lock, caps lock. Black IBM badges were also available to buy from unicomp some time back so it's entirely possible the guy took a very old AT Model M and painted it grey and stuck an industrial badge on there. Not to mention the identification / date badge is missing so that could've been removed to prevent people knowing that it isn't really industrial. Who knows? Coming back to this video cos I find this particular one so damn interesting. Either it's a strange prototype that IBM made or someone did one heck of a good keyboard mod.

Subbed to you btw, you seem to share my keyboard obsession!
Just scored an IBM Model F 84 key AT keyboard today :)

[MisakaMikotoDesu]

Mine has an oval logo on the left side. Neat.

[paulie-g]

The reason you can't find an oscillator on the Lexmark PCB is that it isn't there (in one piece). There will be a resonator plus some caps etc that together form an oscillator circuit. An oscillator is a higher cost, all-in-one component with the oscillator circuit inside of it and is typically used when higher precision or much higher frequency is required. You will typically find higher quality cuts of resonators in an oscillator for example.