History
Long before RGB and hot-swap sockets, IBM built keyboards like machine tools: heavy, loud and made to last for decades. Here's how the legends happened, and how we keep them typing.
1970s
IBM Beam Spring
The Beam Spring was IBM's flagship keyboard of the 1970s, built for big terminals and office systems such as the 5251 display station. Under every key sits a flat spring, the "beam", that snaps over as you press and moves a small pad above a circuit board. The board senses the change in capacitance, so nothing ever rubs or wears out.
The result is a deep, smooth press with a sharp snap at the bottom, set in a case built like office furniture. They were expensive to make and IBM eventually moved on, but plenty of collectors still call the Beam Spring the best keyboard IBM ever built.
It was so quiet that some terminals had a solenoid "clicker" fitted, purely to give typists an audible thunk.
1981
IBM Model F
The Model F arrived in 1981 and shipped with the original IBM PC. It introduced the buckling spring: a coiled spring that bends sideways under your finger, giving a clear tactile bump and a sharp click right as the key registers. Like the Beam Spring, it reads keys through a capacitive circuit board, sat on a heavy steel plate.
IBM built it in several flavours, from the compact 83-key XT to the 84-key AT and the huge 122-key terminal boards. Many enthusiasts rate it lighter and crisper than the Model M that followed, and because the capacitive design barely wears, a well-kept Model F can feel almost new today.
It's so loved that brand-new Model F reproductions are being made again, more than forty years after the original.
1985
IBM Model M
The Model M launched in 1985 and kept the buckling spring feel, but swapped the capacitive board for cheaper membrane sheets held behind a steel plate. That let IBM build them in the millions, and the Model M became the standard keyboard for its PCs and terminals into the 1990s.
Its 101-key Enhanced layout, with the function row across the top and a separate arrow cluster, became the template almost every PC keyboard still follows. Built from thick plastic and steel and held together with melted plastic rivets, a Model M can take decades of heavy use, and plenty of restorers bolt the old rivets back together to keep them going.
Plenty of 1980s Model Ms are still in daily use, often by the same person who first unboxed them.
The Model M never really died
-
1991
Lexmark takes over
IBM hands keyboard manufacturing to Lexmark, which keeps building Model Ms through the early '90s.
-
1996
Unicomp carries on
Former employees form Unicomp, buy the tooling and keep going. They still make buckling spring keyboards in Lexington, Kentucky today.
Today
BarrelledBoards keeps them alive
The switches will outlast us all. The problem is the plug: old DIN, PS/2, RJ45 and 4P4C connectors that modern computers don't understand. Our Soarer's converters translate your Model F or Model M to USB, so it works on any modern computer over USB-C or USB-A, with key remapping and hot-swapping. Every one is made to order and tested in the UK.
-
Pick your connector
-
Pick a lid colour
-
Plug in and type
