posts/fk-7000p-cleaning/

[giscus[bot]]

posts/fk-7000p-cleaning/

Background # While randomly browsing eBay for “old keyboard”, I stumbled across a listing for a FK-7000P keyboard.
eBay Listing Image When I searched it at the time, Deskthority had very little information on it. With the keyboard being confirmed as mechanical, and extremely weird, I had to have it. I love retro computer things and especially uncommon things.
Box # A cool thing about this listing is that it came with the original box.

https://blog.nathanv.me/posts/fk-7000p-cleaning/

[wjrii]

I recently came into a very used example of this board. Mine was a little older, with a beige ball and genuine Alps. Its cords had been cut as a way to "prove" it was being retired from business use. It also had several blown capacitors on its PCB, resulting in a lot of ghosting, as the I believe several of them were used to process and filter the signal in various ways.

For "spacesaving" I believe that just literally means the space that is saved by using the trackball instead of a mouse with mousepad. The IBM Spacesaver TKL Model M was a fairly niche product and likely wouldn't have been the average consumer's first thought.

Overall, I also encountered the odd mix of high- and low-end features. Focus is actually kind of famous for this within the vintage keeb community.

[NathanVaughn]

I appreciate the comment, interesting to see someone else ran across one of these! Yeah, after I posted it, I realized that "spacesaver" probably referred to the inclusion of the mouse in the keyboard.