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Indentifying PB Duo keyboards - revision F?

Byrd

68LC040
Hi,

does anyone know the part number of a PB Duo "revision F" keyboard? The keyboard on my newly acquired 2300c is making my fingers get toned muscles as I have to press down so firmly on the keys to get it to register, I suspect the 2300c is an upgraded older model. Would love to know the part number so I can go looking.

Thanks

JB

 
You might first check the one you have, as working Revision Fs are not that much better than working earlier revisions, to be perfectly honest. Revision Fs simply have an F on the part number sticker underneath. You can't miss it.

The three good Duo keyboards I have (a revision D, E and F as I recall) improved a good deal with use, and softened up, basically, after I had typed away on them for a while. It maybe took a couple of hours. While none of them to this day are what you would call a pleasure to use, they do the business. I recently wrote 50-60pp. of closely spaced text on a 270c with the D keyboard.

I started writing on manual typewriters in the late 70s and early 80s, and the Duo keyboards, to my mind, resemble such a typewriter in action, in the sense that they require a purposeful strike rather than a caress to function. Those who have written pages and pages on good quality manual typewriters would not find a working Duo keyboard to be terribly alien.

The current crop of Apple keyboards, which a person could almost write on by farting at or in their general direction from across a room, are another matter altogether. I make about the same number of mistakes at work on my 2008 iMac keyboard (because it is so sensitive) as I do on a Duo.

All of this is fresh in my head: I was writing something briefly on my 2300c with Revision F a mere 5 mins before reading your post, and thinking that one of its limitations is not the keyboard action so much, which I have learned to live with, as the fact that the keyboard action makes mistakes every three lines or so more or less inevitable.

 
Thanks muchly Mr. Beachy.

I'll hold onto what I have - the fact it works fine, as does the Duo 2300c is what I should be caring about. Just put in a 10GB disk (without checking if it was an ATA6 incompatible drive), and it's booting OS 8.6 happily on 44MB physical RAM.

I have to say the finest keyboard I've encountered on an Apple portable would be that of an Aluminium Powerbook - on a 12" subnotebook form factor, of course :) They're my favourite models to collect - Apple subnotebooks - one day, a MBA ...

JB

 
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