I’ve been using my Liteon SK 6000 keyboard daily since I bought it in 1994(!!) on sale. I loved that thing and it never gave me a moment’s problems until this last year, when it started getting flaky. I could fix the flakiness by re-booting or re-seating the connection, but it finally gave up and died. Luckily I had a cheapie $9.95 keyboard that my husband bought as a backup sitting in the closet, so all I had to do was change out. I went to order another Liteon Sk 6000 but as seen at the link above, it’s no longer being made. ARGH!
One of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, the keyboard lasted so long was that at the same time I bought it I also bought a keyboard protector and have kept it on the keyboard 99.9% of the time, only taking it off a couple times a year to give it a good scrubbing with soap and water then letting it dry. The protector is discolored and even when clean looks grungy but just now, I took it off, and the keyboard itself still looks brand new after 14 years. Whatever new keyboard I get I’m sold on protectors and will get another one.
So, does anyone have suggestions of a keyboard like the Liteon SK 6000? The things I loved about it:
The ergonomic shape. Man it’s hard to go back to using a straight keyboard.
The big-ass “reverse L-shaped” ENTER key.
The big-ass SPACE key.
The fact that I could buy a keyboard protector for it.
I’ve looked around online at other keyboards, but haven’t yet found an ergonomic keyboard with the huge enter and space keys. My husband says they’ve moved away from the big enter keys. Sigh.
Looks like a handful of companies put out an “SK 6000” keyboard. In addition to Liteon, it was also sold by CompUSA, PC Concepts, Maxi Switch, Silitek and Dell. At a quick glance, it also looks like the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard from that era.
Everyone does seem to have abandoned the camel-hump designs. I have no idea if it’s because the newer designs are actually better with regards to preventing RSI, or if the humped design just cost too much and they figured people would by anything with an “ergonomic” tag.
Wow, thanks!! I just bid on it. I had been searching for “Liteon” or “Lite-on” SK-6000 and not just “SK-6000” because I had no idea that different companies sold the same keyboard. In doing that just now, I found another one on ebay that is exactly like mine (I neglected to say that the picture I linked to was not exactly like mine, because mine has a touchpad), but that one’s a bit pricey. I’ll try the other one first, assuming I win the auction. But now I know to search for the model number and not just the name. Yay, thank you!
Whichever one I buy, too bad there’s probably no way I’ll find another keyboard condom for it. The old one is so ugly and grungy, but hey, it’ll still fit! A little scrubbing and it’ll be slightly less grungy-looking. Slightly.
I know. I don’t use an ergonomic keyboard anymore, but then I never learned how to type properly and don’t even try to have my fingers on the “home keys”. Instead, my hands are at an angle already, with my index fingers over the V and N and my ring fingers over the E and O. It works OK for me and I can type 35 WPM. So I never bother with a special keyboard and especially not a keyboard condom.
On the other hand, Equipoise’s keyboard condom has also lasted 14 years.
I really wish I could find an old-school keyboard, like the one my parents had on their original home PC, circa Commodore 64 or maybe a couple years later. It had a fair amount of resistance to the keys, like there were little springs in each key. Also, it made a super-loud clickety-clackity sound while typing.
I keep eyeballing the surplus piles on campus where everyone dumps old computer equipment, but have never seen one quite like it.
That’s it! That’s the one!
I wonder if my parents still have theirs. Are the plugs still the same?
By the way, when I clicked your link, I actually and legitimately squee’ed. I then informed NajaHusband (at the top of my lungs) that there exists a whole website for clickity-clackity keyboards and that I could order one right now!!!
I hate clicky keyboards. “Click click clicking” all the time would drive me insane.
My favourite keyboard is no longer sold. Now I can’t find a keyboard that doesn’t have 25 extraneous buttons that do stuff I don’t need, or that have rearranged the Home, End, and Cursor group of keys so they’re in different places, causing me to hit Delete when I really want End, which is not something I ever want to do.
So my second computer has a stupid keyboard that I hate.
The “PS/2” in 1987 introduced the keyboard connector and interface that most modern computers still have. (It’s still called a PS/2 connector, and non-USB mouses also use it.)
The “AT” in 1984 used a different-size connector, but the wiring was the same, so they can be used with a low-cost adapter.
The “XT” in 1981 had a keyboard that isn’t compatible with modern computers. You can recognize them by counting the keys: an XT keyboard has only 83, while later keyboards have 84 and up.