Model F Labs F77 Ultra Compact review: keyboard from a bygone age
As much as keyboard tech has moved on a lot in the last few years, there's still been a quiet corner of the industry dedicated to the old school. Dig a little down the rabbit hole and you'll find Unicomp, a manufacturer in Lexington, Kentucky comprised of old IBM and Lexmark employees who bought the IBM Model M's tooling back in the 1990s. They're still dedicated to making a variety of models of IBM's legendary Model M 'buckling spring' keyboard that was first manufactured from 1985 to 1996, including the Mini M and 122 key terminal 'boards.Go a bit further though, and you'll come across Model F Labs, a firm that has been dedicated to bringing to life a modern version of IBM's original buckling spring keyboard, the IBM Model F, which preceded the Model M in the early 1980s. I remember floating around on keyboard forums back in the day and seeing the crowd-funded origins of the Model F project, and six years later I've finally got one of these modern Model F recreations in front of me
As much as keyboard tech has moved on a lot in the last few years, there's still been a quiet corner of the industry dedicated to the old school. Dig a little down the rabbit hole and you'll find Unicomp, a manufacturer in Lexington, Kentucky comprised of old IBM and Lexmark employees who bought the IBM Model M's tooling back in the 1990s. They're still dedicated to making a variety of models of IBM's legendary Model M 'buckling spring' keyboard that was first manufactured from 1985 to 1996, including the Mini M and 122 key terminal 'boards.
Go a bit further though, and you'll come across Model F Labs, a firm that has been dedicated to bringing to life a modern version of IBM's original buckling spring keyboard, the IBM Model F, which preceded the Model M in the early 1980s. I remember floating around on keyboard forums back in the day and seeing the crowd-funded origins of the Model F project, and six years later I've finally got one of these modern Model F recreations in front of me - and boy is it fantastic.
I'll get into the reasons why this keyboard is so good in a moment, but it's worth exploring the technicalities of buckling spring keyboards, and why people like them so much. They operate quite differently to your more standard issue mechanical keyboard switch, relying on a spring literally buckling against a plastic paddle beneath it; that paddle in turn presses against the PCB. This changes the analogue capacitance level, which is high enough that the firmware registers an input. That's putting it in as basic terms as I can, and I barely understand it!
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