Honeywell 101WN - that's the one, Time. I have about four of them. I wasn't aware of the model number but you prompted me to turn this one upside down and, sure enough, that's what it is. This particular one, like most of mine, is Osbourne badged, but I understand that they were all actually manufactured by Keytronics. Keytronics and Honeywell had a falling out over licence terms or some such a couple of years ago, which is why Honeywells suddenly became impossible to get but were replaced by identical ones with a Keytronics badge. (I'm talking 104 things now, of course.) Then, about six months later, they seem to have had a reapprochment because that Honeywell badge came back. And finally, about a year ago, or a little less, both brands dissapeared.
We switched to Cherrys for a while - German made and not bad but a fraction too dear and not as nice a feel - then grew dissatisfied with them and bought one each of about ten different brands. To our surprise and delight, easily the best of them was the Samsung "Heavy Duty" model, which is just as nice to use as a Honeywell 104 and half the price too! I think we pay $14 ex for them, or thereabouts. If they had 101 keys and (in consequence) a decent sized spacebar and a little more room, they would be perfect. As our front-line retail keyboard we are very happy with them.
But for ourselves, we use as many of the old Keytronics/Honeywell/Osbourne 101WNs as we can - all or nearly all of our home and office machines have them - and still eagerly trade in old Osbourne 486DX/4-100 systems just to get the keyboards and throw the rest away. But it's rare to see an Osbourne these days, and one by one our 101WNs are failing or falling victim to accidental damage, so I don't have a single spare one anymore.
In the workshop, the 101WNs are both too valuable to bash about and too heavy to be convenient. There we use the same keyboard that we sold as standard with all our systems for five or six years, the Chicony 101: a cheapie but quite good (though not good enough to put on our office machines). (And yes, we have moved up-market over the years: we are happy to spend more on keyboards than we used to in those days.) We have about five Chicony 101s, all with Baby AT connectors, plus about the same number saved as spares.
We also need PS/2 connector keyboards. (Sure, we could use those adaptor things, but they are a pain to fiddle about with when you are plugging machines in and out all day. Fine for machines that get plugged in and left for weeks or months, but not for the workshop.) And these - 101 key PS/2s - are much more difficult to find. The best one by far is our tiny little Amstrad one, off a truly horrible little machine called the PC-5386 (or something like that). They were dreadful little boxes about the size of a copy of
Time - that's the magazine, not the human - and maybe three inches thick. Every single component except for the hard drive (a 40MB Seagate ST-351A/X in most of them) was non-standard. They had a tiny little custom power supply with a one-inch cooling fan that gave us all an instant ten-years-early preview of FOP-38 noise levels, a custom all-in-one main board, even a custom floppy drive (presumably a notebook part) because the case was too small to take an ordinary desktop 3.5 inch drive. ($270 ex tax for the replacement part, if you ever needed one!) From memory there were two CPUs to choose from, a 386SX-25 or a 286-16. They came with DOS 5.0 and Windos 3.1. The dinky PS/2 mouse was horrid, and like the keyboard it plugged into the bottom of the machine (you had to turn it upside-down) because there was no room on the back casing for PS/2 connectors. And the SVGA monitor was a really swoopy-looking pure white space-age streamlined thing that had very little room left inside it (in order to achieve the racy Coke-bottle shape) and got very, very hot as a result. They used to fail regularly - which was probably a good thing, as they had a 0.39 dot pitch. (No misprint - that's zero point three nine. Yuk!)
But the keyboards were magnificent. Very small, no wasted space at all, no useless Windows keys (this was about 1991 or '92, remember), and an excellent feel. WTF was that keyboard doing on that Amstrad vomit box? Anyway, we have had one of them for six years or so and treasure it. We scored another a few months back but don't use it as much. I can't remember why, it must have something wrong with it, sticky keys or something.
We also have two terrible looking Olivetti PS/2 keyboards which are in that distinctive Olivetti mid grey/brown and have square keys - as in not rounded - the keys have sharp corners and a very short travel. Oddly enough, the feel is quite good and we use them a lot, even though one has several of the numpad keys missing. For some reason best known to the now thankfully defunct Olivetti, they have some electronic quirks. Some motherboards just won't boot if you use the Olivetti keyboards - notably anything with an AMD 751 chipset, but there are several others too. But they work with 95% of boards. And then there are the dregs: the heavy Dell with the broken space-bar springs (must see if I can fix it one day, rather than just putting up with it and hitting the space bar exactly in the middle if we happen to have six or seven machines going all at once and they are all PS/2 types) or else throw it away and break out something nicer (a new 104 would be better - stupid Windows keys notwithstanding), the Keytronics 104 with the missing "G" key, the Chicony 101 that does everything except Page-up.....
Anyone know of a box of Amstrad mini-keyboards still floating round? Better yet, a dozen Honeywell 101s.
