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Cherry solid state capacitive

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Overview

Solid state capacitive is a family of foam pad capacitive keyboards from Cherry. A 1983 full-page Cherry advertisement describes their DIN-compliant implementation as a “foam pad capacitive keyboard”. All known models offer hysteresis. The DIN-compliant type is described as having a “snap-in angled foam pad for hysteresis”; this characteristic appears to be new as of the DIN-compliant design, as diagrams in the Cherry catalogues of the higher-profile type do not show an angled pad.

According to Computerworld, 28th May 1979 (NCC preview page 61, document page 101) Cherry would be exhibiting its then-new solid-state keyboards at the 1979 National Computer Conference in the United States. These were models CB80-07AA “secretarial” and CB80-12AA “communications”, as described in the 1979 Cherry Keyboards catalogue. Both of these keyboards were included in the price list from the 1st of March, 1979. However, Cherry capacitive solid-state keyboards have been found advertised as far back as June 1977.

By 1982, CB80 series had been renamed B4V series, with the existing models changing to B4VE series models B4VE-9501 and B4VE-9601 (per the 1982 catalogue).

The original solid-state keyboards are fairly uncommon; they were introduced only a couple of years or so before DIN standardisation led to Cherry producing a reduced-size version. DIN-compliant models are more commonly encountered.

Cherry solid-state capacitive saw plentiful use, including keyboards for the Crumar GDS, ADDS Regent 25 terminal, an unidentified NCR terminal (keyboard model B4TE-8301, NCR part 189-1108238 REV.E), the CDC 721 and Kroy 80K.

Documentation

All documents scanned by Bitsavers unless otherwise noted.