The Avant Stellar Keyboard
I just received my new Avant Stellar keyboard from CVT, Inc. I've mentioned this before in Contra: It's a new build of the legendary Northgate OmniKey keyboards. The OmniKey 102 was standard gear back at The Coriolis Group in the early 1990s, when in addition to editing PC Techniques Magazine, I spec'ed, ordered, and assembled all company hardware on the corner of my desk. (The company was pretty small back then.) When the company grew and we retired the older systems, I spirited away five of the keyboards, three of which are still at least mostly functional. Considering how I pound a keyboard, and considering that they were built no later than 1993, I think this is pretty remarkable.
However, nothing lasts forever, and I figured I had better scout out a source of OmniKey keyboards. You can get them on eBay, and occasionally in other online stores, but the Avant Stellar intrigued me, because it was brand new: CVT bought the tooling for the old Northgate keyboards and has been quietly making new ones for a number of years.
Few people these days have ever even seen a Northgate keyboard, as they were relatively high-end and expensive when they were first-run. Their whole idea was to duplicate the feel of the very first IBM PC keyboards, which had been designed to duplicate the feel of the IBM Selectric typewriter by using a technology called "buckling spring." I had been using an IBM Selectric since 1973, when I was still in college, and so when the IBM PC came on the scene in 1981, its keyboard was like coming home again for me, after several years of using a decent but different keyboard for my CP/M system.
So it's basically a keyboard for old people who learned to type on a typewriter (especially an IBM Selectric) and came to like that crisp, spring-hysteresis feel. Modern keyboards may be acceptable to people who never knew anything else, but to me they feel like typing in mush, and my fingers can't really understand what they're doing, nor (especially) when a key has been definitively pressed.
It's like the ancient and mostly stupid argument about Pascal vs. C: I know what the deficiencies of C are, but C fanatics consider those features, not flaws, and there's not much to be gained in drawing lines in the sand. (One of the essential skills in learning C is the art of shouting down your opponents.) This keyboard works fantastically well for me, and that's really all I care about.
There are a few differences between the Avant Stellar and the OmniKey 102:
- There's nothing under the old DIP-switch hatch. The keyboard is now programmed through an optional Windows app. As a bonus, the app now allows you to create keyboard macros, something a little like what we used to with SuperKey back in the DOS era.
- There's a Windows menu key. Press it, and the main Windows menu comes up.
- There's a context menu key in the bottom row. Pressing it is like right-clicking on the selected object.
- There's an LED under the top one of the four dedicated arrow keys, but nothing I have done so far illuminates it and I'm not entirely sure what it's for.
- There's a duplicate row of function keys along the top. These are mostly useless, but they were present on one of the higher-end OmniKey keyboards, and are a sop to the long-retired (or now dead) mainframe fanatics who knew only the 3270 keyboard layout and howled inarticulately when their row of awkward function keys wasn't present. Having the function keys near the Ctrl, Shift, and Alt keys allowed WordPerfect to be the text machine gun it was without anything you could call a UI. You could press large numbers of shortcut keys with only your left hand; with the function keys along the top this was impossible. (And you wonder why mainframes became extinct! Unlike the dinosaurs, it wasn't because they were smoking.)
- The keyboard ships with CapsLock next to the A key, and the Ctrl key in the bottom row. Once I get used to the layout (which may take some time) the Ctrl-A lunacy (accidently bridge Ctrl and A and your whole document will be selected, and with the next keystroke completely deleted) will be a thing of the past.