Keyboards

[seasoned_geek]

All,

Granted our good friend David can find almost anything and provides stellar service and I certainly wouldn't want to take food from his pantry, but I stumbled onto this place.

http://www.freestuffandmoney.com/forsale/keyboards.html

I don't know how operational it really is since the driver page was not found and an email I tried to send bounced, but some of you have been lamenting not having replacements for old DEC keyboards. I was pleasantly surprised to find a small inventory of them at this site while I was looking for a Compaq KB-9963 driver for Windows 10.

No, I don't have a great love for the keyboard. I just have a few of them sitting on the shelf that were in "like new" condition and thought it was time to get a few million lines of code out of them.

[Andy Burns]

Post by seasoned_geek
http://www.freestuffandmoney.com/forsale/keyboards.html
some of you have been lamenting not having replacements for old DEC keyboards.

I've got a handful of LK-250 keyboards, with AT or PS/2 connectors, no
idea how good a job is possible of mapping puTTY to use all keys
properly? I think the drivers I have/had were from Win NT3.51 era.

[Simon Clubley]

Post by Andy Burns

Post by seasoned_geek
http://www.freestuffandmoney.com/forsale/keyboards.html
some of you have been lamenting not having replacements for old DEC keyboards.

I've got a handful of LK-250 keyboards, with AT or PS/2 connectors, no
idea how good a job is possible of mapping puTTY to use all keys
properly? I think the drivers I have/had were from Win NT3.51 era.

Do the keyboard mapping options in the Keyboard section of the PuTTY
setup help at all ?

Start with the Function keys and keypad section.

Simon.

[Bill Gunshannon]

Post by Simon Clubley

Post by Andy Burns

Post by seasoned_geek
http://www.freestuffandmoney.com/forsale/keyboards.html
some of you have been lamenting not having replacements for old DEC keyboards.

I've got a handful of LK-250 keyboards, with AT or PS/2 connectors, no
idea how good a job is possible of mapping puTTY to use all keys
properly? I think the drivers I have/had were from Win NT3.51 era.

Do the keyboard mapping options in the Keyboard section of the PuTTY
setup help at all ?
Start with the Function keys and keypad section.
Simon.

Let's not forget MSKermit. Last I tried it still worked with
Win7. It always did great VT emulation and keyboard is completely
re-mappable.

bill

[Galen]

I have an LK451 (word processing) keyboard with Ps/2 connector. I bought it cheap and hoped to get it fully working, but ran into two problems I can’t surmount without parts or some serious ingenuity.
1. Someone spilled something (a cola drink, I suspect) into it that ate away several of the traces and contact pads on the two printed-circuit flexible plastic sheets that make up the key switches and wire up groups of them to the encoder circuitry.

2. On the elastic sheet with raised domes that serve as the key “springs”, several of the domes have been completely crushed. They won’t stay in place if you try to press them back up.

I can’t imagine that either type of damage could be repaired (but just maybe someone can prove me wrong) so I’m hoping to find replacement parts somehow.

The keyboard layouts differ between the LK411 and LK451, but I don’t know how the inner workings may differ. Perhaps they use the same plastic circuit sheets, but if so, the encoder logic must differ. I can imagine how the same elastic spring sheet could possibly be used if the keycap posts line up the same, but who knows?

If you happen to have unneeded parts for the LK451, or nonfunctional units that could be scavenged, or some othe source of parts, , please let me know. (I’m not hopeful.)

[Galen]

Actually, conductive tape might work to replace missing segments of trace.