Discoloration of Apple II keyboards

["trulore" <trulore@a2central.com.remove-h1x-this>]

Hi,

I collect and repair of old Apple II computers, mostly the II and II+.

I've collected a few IIe computers, but one question has always bugged me:

Why is the spacebar on old Apple IIe computers always discolored?  Look at any 
old Apple IIe computer on eBay, and the spacebar is this gross discolored 
shade of grey-yellow, even though the rest of the keys on keyboard are 
original grey.  

I don't think the Apple IIe originally had a spacebar that was a different 
color than the rest of the keys, so this must be some odd effect of aging, and 
the spacebar must be made of some material that doesn't age as well as the 
rest of the keyboard.

Does anyone have any ideas?  I've seen this on a few IIc computers as 
well...all the keys are clean and bright and grey, and the spacebar alone is 
horribly discolored.

The very very first Apple IIe keyboards were tan in color with white letters, 
and those do not have spacebars that become discolored with time.  Apple soon 
changed the IIe to use grey keys with black letters, and those are the 
keyboards that have the spacebars that are "poop-yellow" in color.

So I go out of my way to only collect Apple IIe's that have the tan keys with 
white letters.

The later "Platinum" IIe computers (with built-in numeric keypads) do not seem 
to suffer from spacebar discoloration either.

Robert
--- Synchronet 3.14a-Win32 NewsLink 1.85
A2Central.com - Your total source for Apple II computing.