Getting to 2008,

As a gamer I've tried out about every name brand keyboard - Logitech G11 and G15, Merc Stealth, Razer Lycosa, etc....

and by far my favorite choice is the Razer Lycosa, reasoning?

-The keys are rubberized for anti-sticking/sliding when playing on a competitive level

-3 modes of lighting including only lighting the WASD section of the keyboard

-Up to (12 I think) different profiles along with mapable keys down to the MS for macros

-The keys are close enough together that dust, food, as well as anything else particle like is rather hard to get down below the keys.

As a non-gamer I've tried many keyboards too. my favorite so far is the Logitech G-15. The feature I enjoy the most is having 54 (*) programmable keys that are "program sensitive." When I switch from one program to another, the key definitions can also change.

(*) I have one of the older ones with the gray on black LCD display. I believe the newer orange/black display keyboards only have 18 programmable keys.

Yeah, it's the click and feel that makes these keyboards so desirable. A buddy recently called me and said he had purchased a pickup box full of old computers. My first question: any IBM keyboards? I found one Model M IBM keyboard and a whole bunch of off-brand, nearly identical knockoffs. It was heaven on earth.

Curiously, nearly every one of those keyboards had little notes taped to the underside. Each note read: "lower case -- password." Pure nostalgia.

The clicking feel of the older keyboards might be desireable to some...but to me it's a pain to hear. I type so fast it just sounds like a machine gun going off when typing with one of those keyboards.

I have the older G15 as well, and it was a nice keyboard back in the day. I just recently switched over to the Razer Lycosa to play CoD4 with. I still have "that keyboard" for certain games...like the G11 I use for lotro and the Merc Stealth I use for Age of Conan.

tried the unicomp keyboard, no where near the quality or feel of the old Ibm keyboards. Also tried Ione scorpious-m10 and it's a little better, but still not quite the same as the good old keyboards. I'm not so picky but we have 911 dispatchers that swear by the old style keyboards. We do not have any IBM's left, but we have some older compaq keyboards that the dispatchers love.

Excellent story!

I'm an ex-IBM mainframe developer and you are so dead on: There is absolutely no other better keyboard, pe-ri-od! As a matter of fact, I am using one right now--I never gave it up!

Well, I did for a bit, when I bought the Microsoft cordless mouse and keyboard but I have to admit that I like to type and there's nothing like the tactile feedback you get from the IBM keyboard. I gave up my cordless and the Windows key and the Calculator button and all the other extras to revert back to the IBM keyboard. Ahhh...there's absolutely nothing like it.

To this very day, I'm still amazed as to why IBM stopped making PC keyboards with the same tactile feedback and why the standard from all manufacturers seems to be soft-touch and "tactile-feedbackless". Without the feedback, I find all those keyboards horrible to use.

Actually, the original 83key version had one advantage over all that followed. When entering a column of numbers in a spreadsheet, you could enter the number, hit the shift key and the 2, and the cursor would move down one row. (Yes, I know those who are raised on Window and Xcell, that this is a standard feature now, but it wasn't with DOS 1.1 and Lotus version 1 or 1A).

We used to have a lot of the later versions around that came with the PS/2's as they had the smaller connector (today's fading standard) and still connect up without and adapter. They had similar feel and would take a pounding. You could hear one of those especially if the user was frustrated, for many times when he hit enter it was with force. Those keyboards didn't care, they would just keep on going.

Another thing, an experienced typest never had a problem finding "home" as you do on these new one. I have to look now, something I never used to have to do because the feel of the keys was natural and the home keys felt different. Of course finding experienced typests is also becoming more difficult.

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Thanks to Solar Wings for the special siggy.