Seventy-One Keyboards

As far as I can reconstruct it, the first one was an Anne Pro 2. It’s a small keyboard, about the size of a paperback, and it makes a pleasant clacking sound, and I bought it in 2020 because I was at home all day and my laptop keyboard had started to feel like typing on a biscuit.

In my notes, under “Pros”, I wrote: Gateway to the drug.

I meant it as a joke. I’d like that on the record.

The database

Eventually there were seventy-one of them. Not all of them were mine. People in the Indonesian keyboard community lend each other boards the way other people lend each other books, so some of the seventy-one came to stay for a few weeks and then went home. Three of the names in the database end in “Tsara”, which is the community nickname of the person who lent them, and who trusted me with them. Another came from a kid in Solo who lent me one of his own boards. I’ve been in a lot of communities. This is one of the kind ones, as long as you choose your corner. There are keyboard warriors here too, people who will explain at length why your switches are wrong. You learn which group chats to leave.

I know the number because I built a database. It’s called Browntosaurus. It has a dinosaur emoji, and it has tabs: one for keyboards, one for keycaps, one for switches, one called “Experience” and one called “Build Goal”. Every keyboard has a photo, a status, and a score made from five columns: aesthetics, build quality, typing feel, features and sound. Sound counts double. I decided that at some point and wrote it into the column name, “Sound Pref (2x)”, so that future me couldn’t argue.

There are thirty-nine keycap sets in there, and forty-three kinds of switches, each rated one to five. One of my top-rated switches is a retooled Cherry MX Black, which is in the build plan for six different boards, including the one ranked first. I mention this so you understand that the keyboards are only the visible part. Underneath them is a whole economy of small plastic parts, each with its own row.

I’d like to say I’m not proud of it. I’m a bit proud of it.

What I wrote about each one

The best part of Browntosaurus isn’t the scores. It’s the notes, because I wrote them at night, alone, in the voice of a man reviewing wine.

Of the Alice Copper: Mother of Thocc. The thocc of the thocciest thocc. Thocc reborn. “Thocc” is the deep, round sound a good keyboard makes, and it’s the main thing people in this hobby are chasing. I used it three times in one line and then went on to complain about the screws.

Of a numpad, a small separate block of number keys that nobody needs: Are you even keyboard enthusiast without numpad?

Of the 40% layout, which removes the number row and makes you hold a second key to type a 7: Pain. Jari keriting. That means “curly fingers”. Kudos to people who can do this!

Of the 60% layout: this is the layout that drags people into the deepest valley of mechanical keyboards. I wrote this in Indonesian, as a warning, and then I went into the valley.

Of the IBM Model M, the beige 1980s keyboard that weighs about as much as a small dog and that people in this hobby speak of the way monks speak of the Gutenberg Bible: Keyboard alien. Cockpit.

Of the IBM Model F, which is older and more revered: rugged. One word. I had nothing else to say. It scored 24, which is very high, and it’s gone.

The sixty-six

That’s the pattern, and it took me a long time to notice it. Sixty-six of the seventy-one keyboards have the status “Sold/Returned”. Some I sold. Some I gave back to the friends who lent them.

The two highest-scoring keyboards I’ve ever had on my desk are both on that list. One is the Matrix 1.2OG, about which I wrote, Might be board paling ganteng yang pernah dipegang: maybe the most handsome board I’ve ever held. It scored 26. The other is the Jaguar, which I described as having near damn perfect keyboard sound and weighing so much that if you keep moving board all around, this is just ridiculously heavy. It also scored 26. The Jaguar was never mine. It belongs to Tsara, who lent it to me, and I gave it back, which is the correct thing to do with a perfect keyboard that belongs to someone else, and which I did slowly.

The Matrix I let go myself.

I’ve tried to work out why. It was perfect, and perfect turned out to be a strange thing to own. You stop typing on it and start guarding it. You notice the one key that’s a little scratchy. You write in the build notes, Rebuild to fix the scratchiness, and the best keyboard you’ve ever owned becomes a project with an open ticket.

There’s a line in another build note that I think explains the whole hobby: Reprint the Browntosaurus logo and make it more centered. That’s a note about the sticker I made for my own database.

The five

So what did I keep?

I kept a numpad that, in my own words, can seem like a meme. I kept a heavy board called Sagittarius, which weighs 3.1 or 3.2 kg and about which I wrote that it feels like a keyboard that you can still use 10 years in the future. I kept the Alice Copper, the Mother of Thocc. I kept an Alice in polycarbonate called the Aquila, and I’ll come back to it. And I kept one called Libra40, which has never been scored at all. The spreadsheet gives it a zero.

Four of the five are Alices. An Alice is a keyboard bent in the middle, its two halves angled apart, so that your hands sit the way hands actually want to sit, a little apart, wrists turned in. It’s not a beautiful idea at first. It looks like a keyboard that has been dropped.

My note on the Alice layout is the only honest review in the whole database. It says: I touch type, and the first two or three days were bitter. Three to five days in, I started to get used to it. After a week, I was fluent. And then, under “Pros”, the line that matters:

Paling nyaman dipakai. Bisa dipakai berjam jam tanpa kuatir bahu cenut cenut.

The most comfortable to use. You can use it for hours without worrying that your shoulders will start to throb.

That’s it. That’s the review. After seventy-one keyboards and a five-column scoring system with sound counted double, the ones I kept aren’t the ones that scored highest. They’re the ones that took a week to learn and then never hurt.

The Aquila

There’s one more thing the database gets wrong.

If you ask me which keyboard is my best, I won’t say the Matrix or the Jaguar, the two 26s. I’ll say the Aquila, the polycarbonate Alice, which scored 23 and got a bronze medal. Its maker built a few Aquilas, but only one in polycarbonate, and it’s on my desk.

I should be honest about the maker. I don’t like him very much. He’s a little snobbish, and in a community that’s mostly kind, it shows. He is also, and I say this through my teeth, one of the best keyboard builders I’ve come across. The Aquila is god damn great. It doesn’t care what I think of the man who made it, and I’ve had to accept that it’s possible to love the work and not the worker, which is a thing I’d been told about artists and never believed until it happened to me with a keyboard.

So the best keyboard I own came third in my own ranking, from a man I’d rather not have coffee with, and I would not sell it for anything.

I think I knew this about other things before I knew it about keyboards. I just needed to spend a pandemic and an amount of money I’m not going to tell you to find it out with my hands.

My 2021 annual review lists the biggest source of stress that year. It wasn’t work, and it wasn’t the pandemic. It was “keyboard-related debt.” The database is still there, and it still says seventy-one, with the two 26s at the top, sounding perfect in my memory. One went back to Tsara. One went somewhere I don’t remember.

The best one I own scored 23.