KBK update for Sunday, 10th October

It’s finally time to take a look at Transducer Systems, or TSI. Their speciality was “proximity” keyboards: a contactless design based around placing a proximity transducer under or within each key (depending on the design). This is an analogue sensing technique that determines the travel of the key by modulating a transformer. Just as with Licon’s and Fort Electronic’s transformer-based designs, this technique opens the way for direct encoding, by giving each output bit a dedicated winding, a technique that TSI did indeed take up.

The only model ever depicted in magazines is K-9000-A-49, which is a Univac design, suggesting that some Univac keypunch keyboards were manufactured by TSI. As with so many other old manufacturers, no TSI keyboards are known to have been discovered, and it seems that TSI left the keyboard market, perhaps when they realised that their expensive design was rendered obsolete by scanning encoders and their inherent ability to debounce.

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