Technology

Your user name is "dyikeyboards", I feel like we're gonna agree to disagree on this no matter what I say, and I'm fine with that.

I feel like that caveat holds up until you buy a laptop.

You can totally ignore the "niche custom keyboard" market.

With a place like this on every street corner?!

(Just kidding, anyway this little place is an hour south of San Francisco in San Jose.)

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3045/what-was-the-purpose-and-history-of-the-c64s-special-keys

"The Commodore "C=" Key

The VIC-20 removed the numeric keypad that the PET keyboards had, combining the numeric and punctuation keys on the top row with the unshifted keystrokes giving numbers and the shifted keystrokes giving punctuation (!, ", etc.). They also added colour and assigned character codes to change the colour of the text. A good guess would be that this is the reason they added the "C=": it's a second kind of shift that now allows three PETSCII codes to be produced from each key rather than just two. This allows all the original graphics codes still to be produced and adds enough extra keystroke inputs to cover the new colours as well. The same keyboard and decoding was used on the C64, with a few extra color codes added.

Thus, while SHIFT L produced PETSCII code 204 on both the PET and the C64, SHIFT 6 produced code 182 on the PET but an ampersand & on the C64, and to get that code 182 on the C64 you'd instead use "C= L"."

I don't hate. I like a good keyboard.

Now, do I think obsessing about the extremely specific properties of switches and keycaps and spending hours manually embedding each individual key component just to get a specific color combination makes sense as a hobby? Hell no. But then neither does collecting stamps or watching people's grocery runs on Youtube. You do what you want, and this hobby at least lets you put whatever icon you please on the Bixby button.

I'll say this, though, that justification, which I have used often to myself and others, is a terrible rabbit hole of mismanaged finances. That is true of your monitor, your PC, you laptop, your phone, your keyboard, your chair, your desk... by the time you're done you've spent a year's salary setting up your workstation with absurdly luxurious, custom gear that sometimes makes no discernible difference. By all means get whatever stuff saves you from injury and provides comfort and satisfaction, but we all know in many of those categories the quality curve flattens out way before the price curve does.

Also, I guarantee most people with a custom keyboard swap it out more often than people who are still using the crappy board that came for free with their prebuilt or was given to them at work. I have dirt cheap Dell keyboards that still work fine. I may not love how they feel or sound, but it turns out we mastered the art of making buttons a while ago and closing a circuit with a conductive pad reliably is not a particularly costly proposition. Hey, buy good keyboards for the feel or because you have a glitzy hobby, but don't lie to yourself or me about it. You're a grown person, own that superfluously expensive nerdy taste. If boomers could brag about their fountain pens you can smugly bore your friends talking about the injection molding in the keycaps matching a specific pantone that you bought.

Where can I buy these not over hyped but far better keyboards? I'm being serious, I need a new keyboard. Two actually, but one is like DIRE

Such as what? I've always found Keychron to be cheaper

I find it difficult to believe you can go much cheaper than the $50 where Keychron starts for their C series and still get quality.

A couple of years ago when I was looking for a cheap 80% to use as backup and occasional server work I shopped around and you can find stuff at $30-40 but it's not exactly impressive.

Royal Kludge are a decent alternative but they are not "a fraction of the price", in fact they're pretty much the same.