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 😅
I had a ZX Spectrum + and the keyboard was pretty decent was much better than the rubber of the normal one. The Sinclair ZX81 probably takes the cake for worst overall as it was just a very thin membrane.
The ZX81 wasn’t too terrible, and I was also using Apple ][ systems at school at the same time. I think the worst part was the small size, but at least it still had a slight amount of feedback, and you could actually navigate it at a decent speed. Personally I would rate the idea of typing on a phone screen as the absolute worst thing I’ve ever tried to use.
I had the ZX80. It was terrible.
I had a +3. At the time it was much better than rubber 48K keys.
If you are expecting cherry mx switches, you will be disappointed.
I had original rubber key spectrum, they weren’t horrible to touch but they were very slow to type on.
I wrote a bit of BASIC on my Spectrum but there was a reason they had keyword shortcuts on that keyboard. It wasn’t until I got my Dragon 32 which had I proper keyboard that I really got into coding.
I had a Sinclair QL which pioneered the keyboard. It wasn’t great - it was far behind the Acorn BBCs and the Commodores) but it was quite usable.
There was significant vertical travel, and there was variation in the push the key gave back - increasing to a point of no return, then a quick downward movement to the thunk of the end of key travel.
I could type moderately fast on it.
Phew, count me relieved. The keyboard on that clone was pretty linear as far as I can remember with no variation in force applied whatsoever
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
The rubber keyboard was pretty weird first, felt a lot like cheap pocket calculator, but once you got used to the BASIC shortcuts, you could program like a champ on it.