That is a sweet keyboard.<p>It is rather better than my homemade one from 1982<p><a href="https://twitter.com/njcw/status/1368566103933337603" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/njcw/status/1368566103933337603</a><p>My dad gave me a old keyboard from something and I traced the zx81 PCB to discover how it was wired, then rewired the new keyboard the same.<p>I connected it by burning a hole in the case with my soldering iron to poke the wires through!<p>It was a dream compared to the membrane keyboard.
Looks fantastic!<p>Just FYI there was a full travel keyboard for the ZX81 back in the day (and I own one):<p><a href="http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/hardware/dkTronicsKeyboard" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/hardware/dkTronicsKeyboard</a>
<a href="https://t-lcarchive.org/dktronics-keyboard/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://t-lcarchive.org/dktronics-keyboard/</a><p>I should get it out and take some good photos ...
This is definitely tidier than the mechanical keyboard I had for my ZX81—build by a friend in the early '80s and purchased by me circa 1994!—which had keycaps which were more or less photocopies of the picture of the keyboard in the manual that had been photocopied and glued onto the keys of some ancient surplus terminal keyboard, with a healthy dose varnish to protect the paper on top and a lot of kludging of the PCB underneath to configure it to scan the same as the ZX81 membrane keyboard.
A bit nicer than the one I did for a ZX80 many years ago.<p>I simply stripped the membrane key layer off the PCB, and soldered a set of mechanical key caps in place. It worked, and was a lot nicer to use.<p>The key caps were clear (and removable), so I placed pieces of paper with the various symbols under them.
I have one of Davids, it’s a nice keyboard. I also have one of the Memotech keyboards from back in the day - but in 1981 I was “enjoying” the membrane keyboard.<p>David’s whole website is a ZX81 adventure!
<a href="https://www.zx81keyboardadventure.com/p/zx-key-support.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.zx81keyboardadventure.com/p/zx-key-support.html</a>
<a href="https://www.zx81keyboardadventure.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.zx81keyboardadventure.com/</a><p>Memotech Keyboard:
<a href="https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/36275/Memotech-ZX81-Keyboard-and-Buffer/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/36275/Memotech-ZX81-...</a>
My original, self-assembled a lifetime ago, ZX-81 sits on a shelf next to me as I update insane fleets of processing power on AWS. If I can get past the sentimentality of preserving it, the joy of dropping this keyboard on it might just get me to bring it back to life.
It's hard for me to capture the level of nostalgia I have for those 4px graphical elements that you could use for graphics. They allowed you to control graphics with the conditional logic of Basic. I had so much fun making animations with different scenes.
My neighbor had a custom made keyboard for his ZX spectrum, based on reed switches:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_switch" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_switch</a><p>Mine was manufactured at a tractor plant, and one had to press really hard on switch a to get a response.
Why was this never a thing back in the day? I can see the wisdom of getting a cheap one out of the door, but certainly by the time you've got the spectrum, it seems a no brainer to release one with a nice keyboard.<p>I know Sinclair later released computers with nicer keyboards, but it wasn't just a straight speccy.