These are keyboards spanning 1949 to the present, covering IBM, its descendants and companies that have acquired IBM divisions, staff and IP. From the IBM 024/026 Card Punch Keyboard Assembly to the Unicomp Mini M and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16’s Bluetooth TrackPoint Keyboard and Stand… 70+ years of keyboard part numbers documented and counting. My part number database now has over 3,000 part numbers!
I’ve used data from it to present some cool stats on IBM and family keyboards in a series of infographics, giving us a picture of the nature of IBM’s keyboard legacy and what it produced.
The ASK Keyboard Part Number Database is one of the largest repositories of keyboard data on the internet and is made available for research, reference and posterity. The project aims to include all keyboards from “IBM and family” regardless of popularity or type. The project began in September 2019. It’s built upon data collected from official documents and manuals, past eBay and other auction website listings, other repositories like deskthority wiki, and community submissions. At the time of writing, there are 3,081 entries in the database!
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You can access it at Keyboard Part Number Database
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You can also see an extended write-up of this with commentary for key stats: ASK Keyboard Part Number Database reaches 3000+ keyboards!
Keyboards by decade (100% of DB)
Keyboards by family/type
Keyboards by key-switch (96.56% of DB)
Keyboards by major manufacturer (86.24% of DB)
Keyboards by branding (96.72% of DB)
Keyboards by connector/socket (64.39% of DB)
A thank you!
Thank you for reading and HUGE thank you to anyone who has supported me and my efforts over the last 4 years. It wouldn’t be worthwhile if it wasn’t helping anyone, so especially thank you to anyone who uses my resources.
The project is still far from finished. It’s hard to even specify a ‘finish’ line because we really don’t know how much we don’t know about the keyboards left to find and document. But anyway, I’ll see you at 4000+!
Shark
