An Afternoon of Old Keyboards

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Drove out to Pennsylvania to get some old keyboards and some 3.5'' card reader bays. I want a card reader on the front of my computer for vague reasons of sometimes using MicroSD cards to transfer dashcam videos onto my desktop, and they're also just sort of neat. Even if half of the cards it reads are no longer in common service. Plus, extra USB ports on the front of my computer? Yes, please, sounds good.

Years ago, I found a random post on Facebook where a guy was cleaning out his dad's old tech gunk. He was looking for a tech recycler pickup and I offered to come grab the stuff same-day. It was a bunch of gunk mostly, not all that great -- but buried amongst the treasures was an old IBM Model M Space Saver Keyboard in ridiculously beautiful shape. I knew what it was when I touched it and had to hide all of my excitement. Very wonderful lovely awesome keyboard -- that I can never use, because it doesn't have sufficient buttons and I am a trash monkey and fear wrecking wonderful old tech. I sold it on Ebay for $225 and frequently experience vague regret, although I did manage to get my hands on a New Model M a little bit later.

Also years ago, I came across a bank clean-out, and turned $0 worth of tech garbage I literally pulled from the curb into $1,100. It was about 30 computers, ranging from a single very hefty-boy server to a bunch of tiny box-like computers. They all (thankfully) had their hard drives pulled and most were missing CPUs as well, but the motherboards and random case parts sold very, very well. With the CPUs, it could've been double or triple what I made -- but I'm glad for personal data scrubbery reasons both the HDDs and CPUs were removed. It was, after all, a bank containing important personal information.

There's money, yay! And also keeping things out of landfills and making things very slightly better. It's also just straight up fun to pull things apart and see what still works. I'm always chasing that high of finding wonder amongst the trash, so.

Pictures


ZEOS Model KB-6251EA, 5-Pin DIN connector, white alps switches. This one is actually from the weird old physicist lot of stuff I grabbed last summer, but I finally got around to cleaning and listing it out with this larger batch.


LION DS-2009, 5 Pin DIN, white alps switches.


Mtek Model K104, 5 Pin Connector, white alps switches.


Keytronic Micro to Mainframe Keyboard KB3270, unfortunate foam and foil switches that are not in high demand and tend to rot over time. Sad, this one was in unused condition with software included and everything.

Other Stuff

Along with the old bois, there were:

  • Two Apple keyboards -- always a pretty easy sell. One is missing the tab key and I will replace that.
  • A Thermaltake eSports keyboard with blue Kalih switches. I identified it from some pretty terrible pictures of the keyboard box because it was a chunky boi even from the side.
  • Some standard-fare keyboards such as a Logitech K360, Lenovo Ultraslim KBRF3971 mouse and keyboard set still in the box, plus some Dell, Microsoft, and HP standard-fare membrane keyboards.

Spent a couple hours over the weekend cleaning everything up and taking pictures and tossed them on Ebay. Someday I'd like to learn how to convert some of the older guys into USB, but there are soldering skills to learn first.

Listed price for all the gunk I got for $47 is around $850. Which won't be anywhere near the final profit, because I have to pay shipping and Ebay fees out of that.