KBK update for Wednesday, 17th March
Amongst the assortment of archived PDFs that Marcin Wichary sent me, that I had never noticed until today, was an announcement in Design News magazine from December 1983 for Maxi-Switch Series 6000 and 8000. This article was accompanied by an very poorly-scanned illustration of at least one switch type; comparing the text with what little could be made out of the illustration strongly suggested what 8000 Series was …
The relevant issue of Design News is carried by the Linda Hall Library, and after ordering a scan of the page in question from them (which they turned around promptly), the illustration turned out to depict exactly what I hoped it would:
- Maxi-Switch Series 6000 is now confirmed to be “Maxi-Switch vintage linear”: the illustration shows the two switch contacts in front of an assembled switch
- Maxi-Switch 8000 Series is the type that until now has been called “Maxi-Switch integrated dome”: the dome and the base plate with the contact pads can be clearly seen
I knew that Maxi-Switch were never sure whether “Series” should be a prefix or a suffix, but in this announcement, “Series 6000” and “8000 Series” are used verbatim.
The codes found on miniature elastic contact keyboards suggest either 8500 or 8700 series for those, which now fits in nicely with 8000 Series being the full-size elastic contact switches.
The encoding and output page is also updated with an intriguing discovery: an article from 1978 described a keyboard implementation where the keyboard matrix was treated as memory-mapped I/O, using a regular 8-bit microprocessor instead of a microcontroller.
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