Out of curiosity, I’ve been watching a few restorations of those spectrums, and I’ve noticed the keyboards having a rather peculiar construction, judging by today’s standards. They have 2 springs, the small one, as far as I understand, presses the membrane layers together, and the larger one returns the key into neutral position once the key is released.

I personally haven’t used any spectrums, yet I’ve encountered the very same construction on a keyboard of a Russian clone of said machines (namely, zx atas), and to this day I haven’t touched anything worse… The only way I can describe it is like trying to type on a piece of raw meat.

So, if anyone here had a chance to type on the original spectrums, was it this bad? I suspect otherwise since I haven’t heard of crowds of people requesting PTSD treatment, but the whole thing still somewhat bothers me 😅

  • Crackhappy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    You mean the original original ones? Yeah… they were honestly really icky and rather bad for typing on at speed. I type normally at 150+ wpm and the response speed was lacking and only slowed me down. Cleaning them was… not really an option. Not unless you wanted to spend a lot of time painstakingly taking the keycaps/membrane off and carefully putting it back. I’m honestly surprised to hear that anyone would want to recreate that fucking abominable experience. masochists