Both Ducky and keychron have some prebuilt with hotswap. For example the Ducky One 3, you could get it with Red Silent switches and if someone really hates the feeling you can just get new switches and swap them out.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Mechanical Keyboards
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These are what I would get: https://candykeys.com/product/leopold-fc900pd-bt-black
Go for the silent red switches.
Oooh. Nice. Thanks for the recommendation!
I like silent reds too, and my wife thinks they're much more tolerable than the regular reds I had before. Though if you're buying keyboards for others, would it be possible to allow them to choose something for themselves? Not all people like linears, and many of my coworkers actually prefer laptop style scissor switches to "normal" mechanical ones.
My manager once suggested the company could sponsor a keyboard building workshop. She asked me to put together different kits that people could choose from, and then we'd build them together. They would pay for all hardware and provide tools but not pay for the time so we'd do it outside office hours. Then she quit and nothing more came of that.. I don't know the details of your situation but maybe that could be an option if you would like to go the DIY route? It could even double as a team building activity :)
Definitely a good suggestions in general. I did talk to everyone and the consensus was pro-mechanical keyboard but only if they are quiet. So I'm more looking for things to propose to people rather forcing them to use them.
The workshop idea is nice but, at the moment, we are a small company with more money than time. So there wasn't a lot of interest in DIY route at the moment.
I'm so happy that my coworkers have been very tolerant towards my Kinesis Advantage 2 with browns. Though I start a new job in a few months so there's a risk that they won't like it at the new office.. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure my current employer will let me keep the keyboard despite it being bought specifically for me when I got a medical issue with my hand. They might claim it back just to have it sit collecting dust in storage out of spite.
Previously I've worked with a guy who had a keyboard with MX blues at the office but luckily I didn't sit in the same room as him. No idea how people around him put up with that.
You could hire a summer intern for €10/hour to build the keyboards for you :D Not sure if that's a widespread practice, but I think the companies here can get some kind of tax benefit if they provide summer jobs for teenagers.
I've done the intern thing before but I didn't think about it this time. I'm going to check on that.
Imagine what life was like when people used typewriters.
Those IBM Selectrics, especially. Hit keys (mostly) silently, hit Return, and that little ball goes BBBRRRAAAPPP! across the page all at once.
That said, I've been in offices where they used all IBM equipment (including Type-M keyboards) and after a while you don't hear the typing. That might be because you're going deaf, though.
The Selectrics weren't all that quiet. They were electromechanical not electronic, so you would have motor hum, and noises from the various other mechanisms.
Although it made them amazing to type on, in a way that conventional keyboards can't quite recapture.
I meant quiet compared to when the ball printed your line. I guess I should have specified that I was talking about the ones with the little LCD screen that would take all your text and then print it all at once.
(I'm pretty sure they were Selectrics, anyway. IBM for sure. They're what I learned to type on in school back in the dark ages. We weren't allowed to use that feature, but there's always someone that doesn't follow directions so we go to hear what it sounds like.)
I don't believe that they would be Selectrics. Those were essentially big hunks of electromechanical steel/cast iron, and would have lacked the componentry to drive and run an LCD screen, since they didn't have any transistorised electronics at all.
Since the keyboard was mechanical, there would be no easy way for a computer to interpret the input.
From the sounds of it, what you learned on might have been some form of word processor or teletype.
It wasn't a teletype. They were definitely IBM typewriters. They had a little LCD display on them and - if set to the right mode - would display the keys you typed and allow you to make corrections before you hit return (not sure on the name of the return/enter key), which would fire the daisy wheel to type out the line you entered. In regular mode (what we used it in, since it was a keyboarding class after all) it acted like a regular typewriter and typed one letter at a time.
I don't know how old they were. That class was, oh, around 1991 or 1992 I think? They weren't new, and were halfway through the process of being replaced. Half the class was full of 286 computers with typing software on them. We'd trade seats every week between the typewriters and PCs. I assume once the budget allowed they replaced the rest of them, but that would have been after my time.
There were Selectric models that had a built-in memory and supported various word processor functions, but nothing in the Wikipedia article jumped out at me. It might have been a non-Selectric (the memory plays tricks after 30 years), but it was definitely an IBM.
It was probably a Wheelwriter that you remember: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Wheelwriter
Yeah, I saw that. My brain keeps telling me Selectric though. I'll never know for sure - Mrs. Tipton^1^ (my typing teacher) retired the year after she taught me. I'm sure she's long dead by now.
Either way, they were cool and I loved typing on them.
^1^ I grew up in rural white Oklahoma. Mrs. Tipton was my first encounter with an old black lady. We loved her to death, because she took no shit. My favorite memory of her was when one of the kids was switching a typewriter on and off over and over again and she yelled out, "stop masturbating the typewriter!" Peak humor in the 1990s bible belt.
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