There are lots of good, great, and even beautiful keyboards on this site to enjoy - but I saw something today that reminded me of the dark truth that most people will never know the joy of a thoughtfully made input device.
This is a raster image processing station in a very dusty print shop.
I think I need a blanket, some hot tea, and something to help me forget what I just saw…
Share your own keeb horror stories!
But, it’s rather informative. Seems like the user didn’t ask too many questions and didn’t have much reason to type “Zaphod Beeblebrox, quasi-President of the Galaxy” or other phrases requiring Z, X, G, B, and Q.
To be fair I’ve worked in dusty workshops before and the keyboards would always be covered in dust, dirt, grime, you name it. You can’t really avoid it. In fact, I don’t recall anything looking “clean”.
It’s still digusting though. Please wear gloves if you need to use one of these.
Oh, yeah.
This one is kind of far from the presses - the ones right next to them are next-level nasty. There’s a reason even my cheap work keeb goes in a sleeve inside a drawer every time I leave.
My first IT gig, was in a steel foundry. I’ve seen some horrors. We nicknamed the melting areas, “Where computers go to die.” most of the terminals out in the foundry area were touch screens. mounted to metal selfs, or directly to the support beams. The metal desks, were usually covered in 4+ inches of dust, and really only got wiped off, when we went out to work of stuff.
Here’s one of the poor touch screens.
Average office keyboard.
Bouns, found a picture of the magazine article that sold me on my first Mechanical Keyboard, the SteelSeries 7G.
How do you even see anything on that “screen”?
Yep, even I have to agree that the 7G is mighty impressive in the build quality class. Can’t say the same with their Apex Pro though.
The Keyboard is really only there for IT and we would bring a DataVac with us, when we had to fix them. The users, would just wipe off the screen and use the resistive touch screen, with a software pin pad, for clocking in and searching for part numbers.
Ya, it’s a shame, that their newer keyboards haven’t lived up to the legend of the 7G. If only they had iterated on what they had with the 7G and gave it standard ISO and ANIS layouts, their keyboards would be worthwhile.
There is this classic…
Are those filtered Lucky Strikes? Didn’t know that was a thing.
Actually that might be the most surprising thing about the image to me lol
I love that the though process must have at least skirted near the line of, “Well you never know, I guess I might run over it at some point.”
“It’s toasted”
Another winner from the print shop.
Mmm…
…almost like it’s trying to tell us something.
This one is for an almost never used backup plate-making station.
Is that Windows 2000?
If you have it fully working now it is a very good deal!
I’m actually not sure but it would not surprise me at all. There is quite a lot of archaic digital technology in that building. The design stations are pretty up to date, but all the other computers are only as new as they absolutely have to be to make xyz thing happen.
That’s pretty much the case in a lot of industrial settings, I’ve seen lines building cutting edge consumer electronics in China running windows XP.
I was in a factory in Dongguan in 2018 and we were trying to get a laser set up to engrave the devices and having trouble getting the software running and the tech from the laser company was like “oh, let me just connect the PC running it to the internet and download newer software”, that was a windows XP pc and I was kinda worried what was going to get engraved onto the devices after that or if it was going to get inundated with viruses right away lol, it did end up being okay in the end I made sure to unplug it right away after he left haha
