Out of curiosity, I’ve been watching a few restorations of those spectrums, and I’ve noticed the keyboards having a rather peculiar construction, judging by today’s standards. They have 2 springs, the small one, as far as I understand, presses the membrane layers together, and the larger one returns the key into neutral position once the key is released.

I personally haven’t used any spectrums, yet I’ve encountered the very same construction on a keyboard of a Russian clone of said machines (namely, zx atas), and to this day I haven’t touched anything worse… The only way I can describe it is like trying to type on a piece of raw meat.

So, if anyone here had a chance to type on the original spectrums, was it this bad? I suspect otherwise since I haven’t heard of crowds of people requesting PTSD treatment, but the whole thing still somewhat bothers me 😅

  • modeler@lemmy.world
    3·
    5 months ago

    I had a Sinclair QL which pioneered the keyboard. It wasn’t great - it was far behind the Acorn BBCs and the Commodores) but it was quite usable.

    There was significant vertical travel, and there was variation in the push the key gave back - increasing to a point of no return, then a quick downward movement to the thunk of the end of key travel.

    I could type moderately fast on it.

    • fl42v@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      5 months ago

      Phew, count me relieved. The keyboard on that clone was pretty linear as far as I can remember with no variation in force applied whatsoever

  • Crackhappy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    You mean the original original ones? Yeah… they were honestly really icky and rather bad for typing on at speed. I type normally at 150+ wpm and the response speed was lacking and only slowed me down. Cleaning them was… not really an option. Not unless you wanted to spend a lot of time painstakingly taking the keycaps/membrane off and carefully putting it back. I’m honestly surprised to hear that anyone would want to recreate that fucking abominable experience. masochists

  • ma11en@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 months ago

    I had original rubber key spectrum, they weren’t horrible to touch but they were very slow to type on.

    • Alex@lemmy.ml
      2·
      5 months ago

      I wrote a bit of BASIC on my Spectrum but there was a reason they had keyword shortcuts on that keyboard. It wasn’t until I got my Dragon 32 which had I proper keyboard that I really got into coding.