Re: Detachable Keyboard?

[et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Black)]

Zorin the Lynx (yakko@zorin.org) writes:
> I'm surprised it was expensive, considering that in the end, it was just 
> a box to mount the keyboard in. Just duplicate the mounting holes in the 
> IIe case in a small external enclosure and add an extension cable...
> 
> I more highly suspect the company wanted too much profit per-unit, and 
> set the price higher than the market would bear.
> 
> -John
> 
When this thread came up, it reminded me of a II clone I once had.  It had
a case with no place for the keyboard, and the keyboard was an IBM type.
There was a little board plugged into the motherboard where the keyboard
would plug in, and on the board was little or nothing mroe than a
serial to parallel shift register, standard ttl. The IBM keyboard had
been souped up so it would output ASCII in a serial format, so nothing
in the II had to be modified.  The keyboard even came with the original
ROM so it could be used as an IBM type keyboard.

It seemed like a rather nifty arrangement, given that those IBM type
keyboards, at least in  that vintage, likely were better mechanically
than the average clone keyboard.  But of course it did require more work
than a simple extension cable.

When I was using a Radio Shack Color COmputer as my main computer, I
for a number of years had a surplus keyboard that I had wired up to
match the matrix, and run that remotely, just using an extension cable
when the CoCo III came out.  It made things much more flexible than if
I had to arrange things around the actual computer.

  Michael

> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> 
>> It was not cheap, and a detached keyboard was apparently not
>> that high on most Apple user's priority lists.
>> 
>> It's electronically trivial, being just an extension cable.  Mechanically
>> it is more difficult, because of aesthetics and the form factor of the
>> Apple keyboard.
> 
> -- 
> Ned Flat: "Why are you acting like this??"
> Yakko:    "We're not acting. We really are like this."
> Wakko:    "Aren't we lucky?"
> ======================================================
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