Mechanical Keyboards

A journey into fixation.

The first computer I ever used was my friend Mike's Commodore 64. Then there were the computers at school which arrived the next year. This was somewhere around 1989. I was learning BASIC in a computer class while also using an actual typewriter in my typing classes.

That huge keyboard left its mark on me. The guts of the computer were in the keyboard. It made such solid clacky sounds when you typed.

In 1990 typing became Word Processing and in came Mavis Beacon.

Computers weren’t particularly a thing in my family at that point, but I was the eccentric somewhat gifted child, so I was given some leeway. I found a PC case in a dumpster behind a small local law firm. This was in Bayside, Queens, NY. For Christmas my mother took me to Radio Shack and I somehow got my hands on a 386 processor and some RAM.

Voilà, I had a very slow and very loud and huge computer. With a tiny Hercules monitor. Black and white. Well, more like black and sort of yellow.

I played text based games and fiddled around and even started writing stories and saving them on floppy disks.

A few years later, I got a Pentium processor. I installed my first version of Windows. 3.2! Eventually in high school I started working at Staples. Just as I graduated I installed Windows 95 with about eleven 3.5” disks.

After Staples, I moved to Kinko’s and after a long and rather depressing string of college starts and stops I ended up at Parsons School of Design and got my first Mac. The big bubble butt iMac. Graphite. Though I’d been using a PowerPC at work already.

I moved to a print shop in Manhattan and became the plate maker, résumé designer, IT guy, and general digital person.

Fast forward thirty years and there is this pandemic.

Pre-pandemic I had already started getting curious about mechanical keyboards, which already had a thriving, but somewhat underground following. At least in America. I got the sort of default starter board, a Keychron K1.

It was fun, it was noisy, it felt so much like those old keyboards I remembered. But… it wasn’t perfect. There were issues with it. I hated the little seams on the corners. I read there were other, better keyboards that let you remap keys to whatever you want, record macros, change the switches. There were even boards that were completely made of aluminum!

So I got on Reddit. I figured out what Discord was. I started planning. I got used boards, Frankensteined together things on the cheap, waiting for my perfect board. My “Endgame,” as they say. I thought I found it. A beautiful sleek 70% board. A little unusual and very cool.

In two months I was board of it. I started learning how to solder. I started taking apart and lubing my switches. I started changing the springs inside the switches. All to get the perfect feel, the perfect sound, as well as the perfect look.

Now, here we are, five years into the hobby and I have settled down a bit. Mostly because I just couldn’t stomach spending so much money on these toys. I started selling off my older pieces. I started being more practical and prudent.

My current board is a Neo80. What they call a TKL. Ten-keyless. Meaning it has all the keys of a full sized board, except for the number pad. I have a separate number pad. A ZoomPad.

In both I have the rather niche Momoka Shark switches. Which are very tactile, meaning they have a noticeable bump when you type and a sharp falloff. They make a somewhat low “thocky” sound. A deep pop with every key press. And the relatively new MTNU 800 keycaps, which are based on the Atari 800 keyboard from the early 1980s and aren’t too far from the Commodore 64, which started this mess.

I’m deeply in love with this keyboard. And keyboards in general. And god forbid you bring up keyboards in a conversation with me. You will hear this whole post out loud.