Re: Discoloration of Apple II keyboards

[John <zzzjoki@yahoo.com>]

On Mar 3, 7:10 am, "trulore" <trul...@a2central.com.remove-h1x-this>
wrote:
> 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
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Has anyone tried tooth whitener?