Many years ago, around late 1980 my parents were looking into something new. They had a page setting company back then and the work was done with massive and hideously expensive bespoke computers like Varityper Epics. But they were professional tools to get the job done.
The desktop publishing really started after Apple announced Macintosh and Laserwriter. My parents didn't jump on the bandwagon right away and they even had an Amiga 2000 for an evaluation purposes. Well, it turned out to be useful only playing games so it was returned and later on we got an Amiga 500 home.
Eventually they purchased one Macintosh IIfx and one IIsi together with Laserwriter NT and some additional hardware for the computer to film process. Compared to old Varityper computers they were totally different to work on and they were used parallel for quite some time. IIsi was replaced with another IIfx and they served quite a long until replaced PowerPC 8500 and a clone. I was basically the tech support for them so I got to know how to manage fonts and terminate SCSI.
Fast forward almost 30 years to 2020. I was chatting in some cyber security related channel and the discussion went to mechanical keyboards. Apple Extended Keyboard II (AEK) was mentioned and I obviously recognised it. I remember typing a lot with it and I had good memories associated to it. Just for fun I posted 'wanted to buy' advert to a Finnish Apple forum and much to my surprise I received an email from a gentleman having one for sale. Price was negotiated and I got the keyboard with a cable.
The keyboard was fully functional but somewhat dirty and some of the plastic were yellowed including the space bar. All the other keycaps were fine as the plastic is not ABS on those. I removed all the keycaps and washed them. Keycaps were really tight and removal wasn't easy but luckily nothing broke.
For the space bar I cooked up retrobrite mix and dipped space bar there but I left the rest of the case to be treated at summer time with more UV light available. It was surprisingly clean inside the keyboard otherwise. Only couple dead bugs but no usual mix of hair, coffee and breadcrumbs.
There is no USB interface in this keyboard. Instead it uses Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) so an adapter was required. I first thought using Arduino MEGA or UNO clones I had but there were not really suitable for it. I ordered Teensy 2.0 from Aliexpress but then Covid-19 hit and nothing got delivered from China for a long time. After complaining about this at a hacker chat I was offered a something similar and at Disobey 2020 event I purchased a ProMicro with atmega32u4 chip from a fellow hacker. I followed instructions https://chester.me/archives/2016/12/connecting-a-classic-adb-apple-keyboard-to-a-modern-usb-pc-using-a-regular-arduino/ and setup was pretty simple, especially after spending time learning how to flash bootloaders etc on Arduinos.
I used the original keyboard cable and bought a mini-DIN 4 pin connector for the adaptor. Even though the cable is rather long before adaptor it seems to work fine. I was happy with the keyboard but then I remembered the seller mentioned he had a broken Apple Macintosh SE/30...
The desktop publishing really started after Apple announced Macintosh and Laserwriter. My parents didn't jump on the bandwagon right away and they even had an Amiga 2000 for an evaluation purposes. Well, it turned out to be useful only playing games so it was returned and later on we got an Amiga 500 home.
Eventually they purchased one Macintosh IIfx and one IIsi together with Laserwriter NT and some additional hardware for the computer to film process. Compared to old Varityper computers they were totally different to work on and they were used parallel for quite some time. IIsi was replaced with another IIfx and they served quite a long until replaced PowerPC 8500 and a clone. I was basically the tech support for them so I got to know how to manage fonts and terminate SCSI.
Fast forward almost 30 years to 2020. I was chatting in some cyber security related channel and the discussion went to mechanical keyboards. Apple Extended Keyboard II (AEK) was mentioned and I obviously recognised it. I remember typing a lot with it and I had good memories associated to it. Just for fun I posted 'wanted to buy' advert to a Finnish Apple forum and much to my surprise I received an email from a gentleman having one for sale. Price was negotiated and I got the keyboard with a cable.
The keyboard was fully functional but somewhat dirty and some of the plastic were yellowed including the space bar. All the other keycaps were fine as the plastic is not ABS on those. I removed all the keycaps and washed them. Keycaps were really tight and removal wasn't easy but luckily nothing broke.
For the space bar I cooked up retrobrite mix and dipped space bar there but I left the rest of the case to be treated at summer time with more UV light available. It was surprisingly clean inside the keyboard otherwise. Only couple dead bugs but no usual mix of hair, coffee and breadcrumbs.
There is no USB interface in this keyboard. Instead it uses Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) so an adapter was required. I first thought using Arduino MEGA or UNO clones I had but there were not really suitable for it. I ordered Teensy 2.0 from Aliexpress but then Covid-19 hit and nothing got delivered from China for a long time. After complaining about this at a hacker chat I was offered a something similar and at Disobey 2020 event I purchased a ProMicro with atmega32u4 chip from a fellow hacker. I followed instructions https://chester.me/archives/2016/12/connecting-a-classic-adb-apple-keyboard-to-a-modern-usb-pc-using-a-regular-arduino/ and setup was pretty simple, especially after spending time learning how to flash bootloaders etc on Arduinos.
I used the original keyboard cable and bought a mini-DIN 4 pin connector for the adaptor. Even though the cable is rather long before adaptor it seems to work fine. I was happy with the keyboard but then I remembered the seller mentioned he had a broken Apple Macintosh SE/30...
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