After seeing the various Commodore keyboards in Alien: Romulus I'm wondering if these ones from Silo existed in the past too.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Vertical tab key on the left makes me think they tore the keyboard out of an IBM Selectric ( or similar 1960s electric typewriter as I have not seen one with beige keys). Image is too blurry to tell if the left shift looks right though.
If they didn't just put it in an enclosure they made then it's probably a terminal of some sort like a DECwriter, but not that cause it looks like it only came in black.
In the context of the series, a terminal would make a lot of sense.
That space bar is a mile long! Is that a Commodore keyboard?
I've never seen a C= computer with a vertical tab key, so I doubt it.
It looks very Commodore but aside from the odd caps on the corners, which may just be custom placed there, the biggest oddity would be the straightly aligned keys on the edges. On the older Commodore boards that share the general design of this one, the two bottom rows are usually slightly more aligned towards the left, compared to the top rows. Atari had some similar keyboard layouts like this but they generally looked different. Maybe some modern retro inspired replica.
I'd wonder if it's a typewriter keyboard module. The layout is odd-- that two-line tab is unusual for example.
I suspect this is the most likely answer. I still haven't found out what model it is yet, though.
Hard to say for sure but based on how the case looks blow molded and the spherical keycaps I suspect that it might be a Futaba manufactured vintage keyboard in the image. Couldn't tell you what model though, I'm sorry.
The blow molded case and spherical caps and oddly shaped tab and lone spacebar on the bottom row are all things that used to be common in the late 70s and early 80s but are no longer common in keyboard design so I do think it is authentic vintage even though I don't know much more than a strong guess about the manufacturer (Futaba) and an educated guess about the switch (Futaba MD, MR, or ML series) and keycaps (doubleshot injection molded ABS).
Hope this helps!