What is the Model M you ask? You are obviously new to computing.
You can keep your fancy pants whisper quiet keyboards of today. Take your DVORAK, your ergonomic, your cheap throwaway free keyboards that come with your new Dell and throw them all away.
For those of you that have only used these, you do not know any better. You can still be forgiven. But for those that started on the Model M, and have moved on to something else, all I can ask is, what were you thinking?
When you type on a Model M, you know you are typing. Those around you know you are typing. There is no question that typing is being done. (As I am typing this, my co worker that lives on the other side of the wall in this veal fattening pen known as the cube farm starts to get annoyed.)
When I relocated to another state to take a new job, one of the things that was placed into my trunk so that it would be with me on the first day, was my trusty Model M.
There is a tactile feel to the keyboard that has not been duplicated by any other keyboard I have tried. These keyboards are indestructible, I have been using the same one for years and years, and expect it to last until I can no longer type.
They have ps/2 connectors, but with the advent of ps/2 to usb connectors, I do not see any reason that these keyboards will not keep on working in the future.
I guess if you never had one and do not know any better, you can be forgiven, but after reading this, you should go out and find one.
From the wikipedia article:
"The many different variations of the keyboard have their own distinct characteristics, with the vast majority having a buckling spring key design and many having fully swappable keycaps. Model Ms have been prized by computer enthusiasts and heavy typists because of the tactile and auditory feedback resulting from a keystroke.
The Model M is also regarded as an extremely durable piece of hardware. Many units manufactured since the mid 1980s are still in use today, while the computers and monitors of the day have long since been thrown out, recycled, or retired to museums."
from another site that I enjoy:
"For two decades, the IBM Model M Keyboard has been the defacto standard human interface for force-feedback computing. Constructed with "buckling spring" action and a chassis that doubles as a weapon, Model M's appeal to stone-code scallywags and hackers alike. This site honors that which is built on Selectric technology, and those who click them into kernels all over the world."
