KBK update for Wednesday, 11th August

Around five years ago, Meryl Miller sent me some scans of printouts of scans of photos of Datanetics’ batch-fabricated array membrane assembly. Until now, only one of those historical photos has been available, one that Meryl re-scanned for me. In July, Meryl posted me the original photographs, which I have scanned in high resolution and uploaded. These photos give us a glimpse of a rare keyboard technology seldom encountered; only one such keyboard is currently known to have been discovered.

Ongoing examination of old magazines also turned up some missing details of an even rarer switch type, Fort Electronic Products Fero-Snap. Previous attempts to find the patent had failed, and now the reason is made clear: Fort Electronic was owned by Syner-Data and it was they who took out the patent. From the patent, the method of operation is finally clear. It is another encoding type, using separate transformer windings for each output bit, just as with the original design of Licon Series 550.

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