Five years of Admiral Shark's Keyboards

Admiral Shark's Keyboards is now five years old! Half a decade of keyboard science and excellence complete with no signs of slowing down. This year has overall been more active than last as there were (finally) some meetups to attend, I got back into writing articles, the database reached a new important milestone, and I started overhauling important content to make them even better!

Perhaps given the significance of this anniversary, I found myself reflecting more inwards than outwards compared to previous years. The journey versus the destination. During a discussion on my Discord server just a few days ago at the time of writing, I reflected on the challenge of getting Admiral Shark's Keyboards to where it is today and that gaining its acceptance was no small feat. I remember a particular instance where a comment of doubt against my database and its potential utility got me down, thinking the criticism was unfounded. I never really discussed this before as I prefer to put on a positive face no matter what, but for some period, I really felt I had to do a lot to earn my position in this hobby. In some ways, I could see why, since I was just someone new who arrived with a website. I'm glad that in the end, I turned this into a desire to constantly improve no matter if I thought the comment was unfounded, ultimately turning a negative into a positive.

I'm so happy with how far this project has come and that in some circles people refer to me for IBM and family keyboard knowledge or opinions. It's a trust I don't take for granted, and I hope to only use it to motivate me to make this website even better, discover more new things about the keyboards we all enjoy, help preserve old hardware and help others. I'm glad I'm in a position where I can research, collaborate and publish very cool and novel things and have an audience that care about what I do and write and what I'm out to achieve. I'm glad I have my Discord server, /r/modelm, and all the patrons that visit these relatively small but proud communities. It doesn't matter how big or small any of these are, helping just one person is a success. Sincerely, thank you everyone. I hope you stick by for the next five years! Keep reading to see what we have done since September 2023...

Cheers,
Kali

Contents

Exeter & Leeds meetups

Finally(!), I had opportunities to attend keyboard meetups again. The last one I attended was MKUK Meetup 6 shortly before ASK's third anniversary as there was no big MKUK Meetup for 2023, and to my knowledge, no local meetups for (South) Wales have ever been organised. But before MKUK 7, I attended a 'mini meet' in Exeter, England on 4^th May 2024 to present a small but robust sampling of buckling spring and buckling sleeve keyboards and some Modular Keyboard Converter prototypes.

Then came MKUK 7 on 22^nd June 2024, which was held up north in Leeds instead of London. For this, I took a larger sampling of my collection including four buckling-sleeve Model Ms, three buckling-spring Model Ms, two Model Fs, a reed-based IBM Electronic Typewriter Keyboard Assembly, and for the first time a Model B! One of the buckling-sleeve Model Ms came in the form of a working IBM ThinkPad 365ED running Windows for Workgroups 3.11a that typically just looped a PowerPoint presentation showing my socials, the major IBM keyboard families, and a Modular Keyboard Converter prototype. My table also had some loose Alps and SMK keyswitches and some Modular Keyboard Converter prototypes yet again. I also gave a presentation on IBM buckling sleeves and won prizes for first and second-best vintage keyboards in a voting competition. At both this and the Exeter meetups, reception towards all my keyboards was overall positive, but I think in particular there was a lot of praise for the buckling-sleeve Model Ms.

Coverage of the Unicomp RP2040/Vial-QMK guide

My Unicomp's RP2040/Pico controller purchasing & Vial-QMK guide - written with the support of Purdea Andrei - was one of my favourite contributions of the keyboard community last year. A few months after its release (and just a couple of days after ASK's fourth anniversary), it was picked up by some other media outlets including adafruit, hackster.io and Tom's Hardware, which was neat to see. I'm especially glad that Purdea received mentions/credit in some of these as well, as they were the real brains behind making the guide a reality with their firmware port!

Two new articles

2024 saw me finally return to writing articles, spurred on by discoveries and an important birthday in the IBM keyboard family. On 16^th June 2024, I introduced and explained three 'new' IBM keyboard model designations that were seldom known to the keyboard community. "Model G" had long been suspected to be the original designation for Model M keyboards as it had appeared on some internal rear labels on Greenock-made IBM Enhanced Keyboards from their beginning until sometime in 1987. Whilst investigating a possible Enhanced Keyboard prototype they then-recently bought, deskthority user rocco_16v asked the IBM Archives about it and they in turn shared concrete evidence that they considered the IBM 3161 and 3163 ASCII Display Station Keyboards (eg, part numbers 1386303 and 1386304 respectively) to be "Keyboard G". I also found this designation seemingly repurposed as strictly meaning an IBM Enhanced Keyboard (a 101 to 104-key Model M), with the rest of the Model M family not being considered "G". For example, I found Model M based IBM Converged Keyboards were also considered "Model 1A" keyboards as a contrast to "G" for terminal usage. With the additional find that the non-Model-M IBM 104-key Quiet Touch Keyboards were designated "1B", I presented all the evidence with commentary.

Only 11 days later, I released another article, this time celebrating the 40th birthday of the earliest Model M based keyboard in my collection - SNKB-M1984-WWA-75 (an IBM 6747 Model 1 Wheelwriter 5 Keyboard Assembly). The article describes how such IBM Wheelwriter and Quietwriter keyboard assemblies are presently the earliest Model M based (membrane buckling spring) keyboards observed, being made at least a year before the general availability of the IBM Enhanced Keyboard. The article details what is particularly special about these earliest of early Model Ms and a possible preamble to future typewriter-centric content!

Revamped popular pages

Back in February, the very useful topic on (non-laptop) IBM and family keyboards with TrackPoints, trackpads and UltraNavs was revamped. This page has always been one of the most popular on Admiral Shark's Keyboards - ThinkPads have a large fanbase and IBM and family keyboards have a large fanbase, so go figure. The largest change was adding various Lenovo ThinkPad tablet keyboards, which were notably absent from the previous revision. Due to the sheer number of keyboards now present, the page was reorganised into categories based on similar keyboard styles and/or similar keyswitch designs. The pointing stick comparison was made more useful, more symbols were added for more key features, and in general the photo selection was improved.

Not far into August, I dropped the biggest revamp of a Shark's Wiki page yet. The IBM Enhanced Keyboard - the definitive Model M keyboard - is what enabled the Model M family to become as successful and influential as it was/still is. As such, it deserves only the best writing and attention to detail! I have been working on this revamp on and off since January, leaving virtually nothing unchanged. From improved use of terminology, to detailing two found prototypes, to making the "Generations" section actually useful, and to increasing the sheer number of known variant descriptions... I hoped to address some things I felt were missing from the previous incarnation of this page, deskthority wiki's rather decent IBM Enhanced Keyboard page, and Wikipedia's Model M keyboard page in general.

New Keyboard Dictionary

At the end of March, the Keyboard Dictionary (a previously seldom known and advertised site feature) was completely redone from top to bottom. As the name suggests, it is a place that defines terms chucked around in this keyboard hobby. Whilst similar resources exist online for "mechanical" keyboards in general, this one is very much IBM and family orientated and tries to provide more consideration and technical depth relevant to such keyboards. The changes include a completely different presentation (it was previously just a giant table), the ability to sort via letter or category, more supporting data points (origin, alternative names, etc.), better shareable pages, and of course more terms, better descriptions and better photos in general.

I hope it will be useful to anyone new or presently in the hobby. The previous incarnation was created in the early days of Admiral Shark's Keyboards and I wasn't happy with how it looked or its quality, and admittedly I poorly maintained it and seldom promoted it. This new one has become better integrated into the website as whenever I produce new or modify existing content, I add direct links to ASK Keyboard Dictionary definitions where appropriate. I'm also experimenting with making my website's framework automatically add such links to all content.

Other updates

General site improvements

Besides content, I've continuously explored ways to improve this website's usability, accessibility and identity. Whilst accessibility is still generally something that needs further improvements, here are some of the neat things changed about this website:

Home page carousel

Besides a cool photo of the day and the main menu, the first thing someone will now see on this website's home page is the "What do you want to do..." guide that was added on 15^th July 2024. It replaced a similarly titled section of large photo links that I added a few months earlier that looked very similar to the rest of the home page.

This attempts to address questions a first-time visitor might have and get a snippet of what this website has to offer without reading the entire introduction; a carousel of slides containing a question or idea for something to do, an image, a brief description, and a link to take them to answers.

Improved introduction

The introduction page is something I always think "am I getting this right?" since it needs to serve as a good introduction to not only this topic but also what Admiral Shark's Keyboards aims to cover and achieve. It needs to be a 'good-enough' overview that is informative, not too technical, but can also inspire the reader in some ways and quickly convince them the topic is worth reading. Compared to this November 2023 snapshot of the introduction (and besides general tweaks to the text here and there), the following have been changed or added:

Navigate via image

Admiral Shark's Keyboards by its very nature of being exhaustive is very heavy on text and images, so a new method of navigating quickly was added during this last year - "Navigate via image". Especially useful for those who wish to find something when you don't know what something is called but may know what it looks like, you can click its button, see all the images on the page and click one to navigate to it. Most large pages that have a lot of text and images should have this option available.

Light/dark mode option

The navigation bar has been tweaked slightly over the last year as well. I've mostly been shuffling things around and trying to minimise the clutter of options available. However, one notable change was adding a (settings) menu that presently houses the "Enable [light/dark] mode" option. This option was previously only available as a button on the home page.

Other small tweaks

And finally, I've been making small quality-of-life and styling changes here and there. In particular, I've been trying to remove as many generic "Request Error" pages as possible with things actually useful. For example, the Keyboard Directory and Keyboard Part Number Database now have "not found" pages that give the user an option to search the respective resource or see everything related to it if they try to go to a unique single-view page with an incorrect or outdated ID. Code block and blockquote page elements are now stylised from their previous generic appearances.

Previous anniversaries: Year 2 - Year 3 - Year 4