Keyboard Cleaning Day

I've been neglecting my bloggage lately, so this is the first of two very delayed posts about things that have happened.

On Friday, April 17 the filthyness of my SGI "Slab" keyboard finally pushed me over the edge to actually clean the thing again.

I pulled every single keycap off, vacuumed the cat hair (since I don't really have much hair on my own head these days) and crumbs from beneath, scrubbed the plastics with soapy water and washed the gunk off each keycap individually.

It took several hours but it sure made typing nicer... In case you don't know, the keyboard was made sometime after 1995, so is about 25 years old by now. The keycaps still have every label, although I seem to have worn an indentation where I usually keep my thumb on the space bar. Quite a lot of the keycaps have lost their textured surface and are quite smooth to the touch. You can easily tell the difference to keys that aren't frequently used.

This keyboard is one of the newer type of SGI keyboards and doesn't use a proprietary communication protocol and in stead talks PS/2 (mini-DIN connector). It will work in a PC, if the PC happens to be old enough to actually have a PS/2 socket.

I use the keyboard plugged into my SGI Octane and connect it to my desktop PC via a really old version of Synergy. This works really well, but I've given up trying to port Synergy to IRIX so I'm stuck at an old version.

The actual keyswitches are ALPS mechanical ones, and still work prefectly after all the use it's seen, although last time (in 2011) when I cleaned it the numpad plus button became slightly unresponsive. The cleaning this time completely fixed that for some reason, but instead made the spacebar and right shift unreliable. Some judicious tapping on the keys have apparently fixed these problems though. The spacebar is now perfectly good again as well. Phew.

Taking it apart is fairly easy--unsurprisingly it's really well made--but to get to the top of the circuit board is a big hassle because all of the keycaps are clipped to a metal plate on top of the circuit board and you'd have to unclip every last one of them to take it off. Not something I would relish doing.

Pictures of the adventure can be found here, and here for cleaning day I in 2011.

Staffan