Keybort

This one is a MicroWeb Touch-1 XT/AT. Kinda.

See if you look up that keyboard you find the Deskthority page on it, showing this.
It's clearly pretty similar, but there are some differences.
Also that one uses a PC/XT/AT DIN5 connector, and this one uses some kind of RJ connector.
This one isn't in the greatest of shape, but considering I got it from the Chuck Colby estate sale, it's surprising it isn't completely water-damaged.
It's got some minor rust damage inside, where the metal clips rubbed off on the PCB.
And the control chip is a C35331E.
It's one of those chips you can find a few places that'll sell you one, but nowhere has a datasheet.
"8647" is probably a date code? 47th week of 1986.
That matches the chip on Deskthority.
And all keycaps removed! These are "Futaba MA series" (aka Futaba clicky switch) switches.
It's got 5 pins connected. AT is only 4 pins, but the PC/XT keyboard is 5 pins. So maybe this is a switchable keyboard?
the Deskthority wiki seems to partially agree with that:
There's a jumper under the tab key, which is theorized to be a XT/AT switch.
SO, what the heck is the pinout? I have no idea what the pinout of the IC is, and nothing to connect this to to spy on it, and no results online for googling the name other than the one that's shown up on deskthority.
Well, the PCB has two other chips on it.
They're both 74-series logic.
We can easily find datasheets for those and they should be sharing power/ground.
green is +5V
and either blue or yellow is GND.
(they both seem to be ground, at least as close as my multimeter can tell.

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Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.

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I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.

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