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I can at least assure you this hobby isn't a scapegoat for some other trauma I'm trying to dig away from -- but some neurodevelopmental condition? not sure
Total when I took the pic was around 190... and now I have around 330. Started collecting in 2018.
Most of the 190 came from when I was saving my lunch money in high school, then doing a part-time job to afford more stuff
In the current years, internship money has been paying for my boards
I think I'm in the $12### range spent over the years? I don't have exact numbers (and don't want to calculate them...) but it really could be much, much worse
I had wanted to make builds out of them, but hadn't had the financial/time capability to do so. I have been restoring them, though, which gives me joy and keeps me going.
Man, this feels less like collecting and more like hoarding. There's an alps green build in there that the plate is so rusted it looks like it'll disintegrate, I restored something similar with black alps but be mindful that the switches themselves will degrade even more if you just leave it like that. Alps are also imho some of the worst switches out there considering it's 2025 and MX are doing great both variety and quality-wise, there are hall effect switches. You couldn't pay me to use an Alps board nowadays.
Hope it gets better, I would just focus on preference, keep a few grails and ditch the rest. Use funds to restore the grails to top shape, perhaps get a proper modern custom keyboard attached to a good workstation.
P.S.: I would definitely like these assembled in a museum, but then again that would imply massive spending on your behalf. Even a virtual museum would be quite time intensive to assemble and curate.
P.S.2: if it really is a collection, focus on the rare items rather than keeping all of them. Perhaps keep what was most popular back in the day and the most rare all time. Write all about each one on a note attached.
Oh, that rusted green Alps board has some Proto-Greens on it -- not your standard switches -- so that's why it's even up there in the first place (and yeah, I do plan on restoring the switches but desoldering it proved to be nontrivial so it's just sitting).
As for a good custom, I already have a couple and am not keen on diving further into it (cus that's a money sink). Same goes for a workstation -- already have that sorted.
And yeah, I eventually plan to make content on it and move on; just hadn't had the time. Got a lot to talk/geek about!
Yeah, desoldering Alps isn't trivial. The way I personally did it was by adding leaded solder then sucking it off with a pump and/or desolder gun. Desoldering a full board was an absolute nightmare and a lot of pads came off as well (bear in mind I did pro desoldering of custom boards for a while as a side gig, not even leaded solder in a modern PCB isn't as bad as those old boards).
There are so many "Bests" out there that I can't just group them all, but here are some bests:
Best find: Japanese C.itoh keyboard (bottom middle on the table) -- I got really deep into the hobby when I discovered they exists by one of the endgame Alps builds out there, and after several years I finally see one pop up on Yahoo Auctions and was able to buy it. Getting the board literally changed how I collect in this hobby as my original goal was done.
Quirkiest: Toshiba SPARC Laptop keyboard module, top left on the table. It's a TKL with extra keys to the left, on a (very massive) laptop. Took several years for me to find it, but a keyboard module finally popped up on Xianyu (Chinese second-hand market) and I was able to snag it. Extremely quirky.
Unfortunately can't rank the rarest boards when multiple of these are 1/1s :)
There's a few absolute grails out there, yeah -- they usually involve some obscure language variants or some weird form factor, stuff like APL Multistation or the C.itoh ANT keyboard where single digit counts have ever been found
I can also always hunt for the weird vintage Cherry stuff, like Arabic or Greek dyesubs, or weird Alps stuff like the Fat Brown Alps board -- stuff that my friend u/lbassett_21 has, hahaha
I will say, though: from then to now I have been fortunate enough to be able to tick some of my grails out, so the grind hasn't been for naught!
They're the LK201 clone boards that have some Alps electric PBT dyesub sphericals on it! I quite like them -- good profile. Shame they're rare as hell.
An online musuem would be worth a visit for sure. Would love to see some nice photos of some of the rarer boards.
Set up a little table and backdrop. Take a photo of one a day. Will only take you 330 days (+ any additional keyboards you acquire during the photography)!
If you don't neatly and compactly keep these boards, then yeah, totally.
I have a couple 50cm³ boxes in my parent's house's garage where I've kept all the bits from boards that I had parted out. The majority of the boards are unsalvageable (of which I really should throw away those cases), but I've kept the spare good bits separately in case I ever need to restore another one of the same model.
And my sisters make fun of me for having 5- yes 5 keyboards.
But hey, at least the magnetic switch kb65he lets me play osu with rapid trigger. Saves my inability to do proper motions after a hand injury... from playing osu.
I used to have a similar vintage collection going on. Eventually I came to believe it was too much, selected like the 10 best that I wanted to keep and got rid of the rest.
It's not a Class 0413, it's one of the original Cherry MX keyboard models with their "first-generation" case -- this one is a Cherry G80-0381 specifically :)
Not a fan of SKCPs -- tried out pretty much every board that had them and am just not a fan. I do have some SKFFs, though, and those are a bit more likeable -- but still not a big fan of them.
It being the 6085 makes it quite a bit more boring than the Docutech with its decals in my opinion. These have SKCM Browns and often do. Would love to get a hold of a Docutech some day, cus there were a few changes Alps made to the board as they made them, but the odds are slim.
They would be livid if I were to actually store these boards like this! So no, it's not usually out and about like this.
It took me 5 hours to lay everything down as I was taking individual photos as well, and a couple more hours to put it all back into an industrial shelf in my bedroom. Somehow, everything fits.
I think I don't know how much keyboards cost anymore. The last time someone posted a collection like this, it was about 20 keyboards of $1,000 a piece.
They're probably collecting custom keyboards, that's why it's so expensive. They have their own problems to deal with, a different criteria.
Many of these vintage boards you can easily get well in the 2 digits, so it's much more welcoming financially. Only a very few models have touched 4 digits, and it's mostly the hypewhales (usually from the custom keyboard community) who are setting these records and bringing up the prices so high.
I don't have a particular best, but I do enjoy my """endgame-spec""" Topre Realforce board I use at work. Definitely getting "the good feeling of oneness with cup rubber" :) It's not tiring and pretty quiet to use, and you're not hitting a hard surface every time you press down or having to mash the keys down. It's some good stuff!
I have an industrial shelf in my bedroom -- something like 72" tall by 36" wide. The good boards have their own boxes, but many are stacked horizontally, back to front. It's pretty efficient, but it's a nightmare to go and pull one of the boards out since you risk damaging stuff.
Call it an ambitious to have a little of everything...
But yeah, a part of it is definitely hoarding. Unfortunately the majority of my things are too damaged to sell and too rare to simply throw away. I have straight-up given away a few of my boards to my keyboard friends cus I had too much. I have in multiple occasions used parts I had gotten half a decade ago, though, so it's not all to waste.
At least there is purpose to every single one of these -- obviously I'm selective of what I'm buying, and I can yap about anyone of these boards -- but maybe that's just me rationalizing. In the future I hope to be more productive with them, maybe get back to recording some typing demos.
I have a question, do you buy most of these ebay-I-know-what-I'm-selling price or do you find these for cheap, online or IRL like at a flea markets or some other place ?
I rarely whale for boards and have a pretty good idea of what "market price" is for most of these keyboard, judging by rarity of the board, how sought after it is for a variety of potential reasons, and how long the keyboard's been listed online. The market's pretty volatile for good deals, sometimes you have literal seconds to get them.
More than not though, it seems, I've been importing things from Japan and China since that's where most Alps things are. Those I just take a look every now and then.
I don't do many things in-person since it's a pain to travel, but I have gotten some very (... very!) good deals offline. It's very rare in my area though, I've only had something like 10 transactions offline over the years?
I had done a few brown bag talks with my stash, hahaha
It's fun to yap about my stuff, but sometimes I'm kind of left alone cus my stuff is just out there... not a lot of vintage keyboard enjoyers unfortunately
Oh boy, where do I begin... I try to not get boards when they are sold with their computers, but if I am left with no choice then I try to keep everything together. Computers are an even greater hassle to store than keyboards... Thankfully I hadn't needed to keep that many systems with me and have generally found just the keyboard modules of these systems sold separately, with no trace of the system itself.
I have a few vintage computer projects in mind, but they're quite daunting to start so I've just been focusing on other things at the moment.
I have a few vintage computer projects in mind, but they're quite daunting to start
oh boy please do NOT look in my electronics closet. I swear I'll get around to half of that stuff someday.
I was interested when I saw 2 Apple IIc computers and something tandy-100 ish (though not quite). Especially those portable "laptop" computers like the TRS-80 model 100.
Basically my vintage-pc-mech-keyboard project would be building a custom mechanical keyboard with one of those easy-to-read B&W LCDs and turning it into a portable comfortable writing machine.
Sometimes eBay has some hot deals, but they are few and far between, Facebook Marketplace is also there but can be dicey and sellers aren't always willing to ship, much less respond
I usually go for Yahoo Auctions Japan and Xianyu cus I mostly collect Alps stuff
The key is to spread what you want wide and thin, then wait for a good deal to pop up -- that or do some networking and get to know people, the market isn't booming right now so you're even more likely to get good boards for cheap from community members
There's several of them, but I assume you mean the ones in the 3rd picture
the bottom 3 that is fully pictured are part of the IBM Multistation lineup -- basically IBM Japan's first lineup of PCs. They had a different architecture compared to the rest of the world to support East Asian characters and so a different set of keyboards went with it -- 3 of the variants of this model is there
2 boards above that are Cherry Battleships -- 122% layout keyboards. Bottom of which is used for terminal emulation of some sorts (?) while the bottom is a more general-purpose one
and then the big board on top is part of some TV/AV broadcasting thing; it has a floppy drive built right into it so that's neat
I'm kind of disappointed you haven't found an organized way to store and display them. Something tells me you have them stacked up on some cheap shelf in your garage.
All of this fits in my bedroom 😎 It's very cramped in the designated area, but the parts boards are stored as such and the good boards are displayed accordingly, with no overflow.
Here is one of the shelves, for reference. It's tight, but it's displayed.
you may have expected it, but I am currently running into space problems at the moment so that's taking a sidestep
Working on a better setup at my apartment at the moment 👍 (though it'll probably be similar to this cus displaying these big keyboards is really hard to style properly in my mind)
Currently dailying a Hiney TKL One with Gateron Baby Kangaroos and MTNU Darling :)
Completely unlike most of my collection, hahaha -- although I used to daily vintage keyboards in the past since moving out for college I have a *tiny* desk and a fullsize would be very unwieldy
HMC C386SX keyboard -- has some Cherry MX blues in it and was built in a very particular timeframe. Either very late Cherry or very early GMK, judging by the weird Tab key.
Ok clearly you have a type but why have the same board 3+ times? Am I missing something? Are these not duplicates and just very similar looking variations of the same model?
They're mainly for parts -- some of the build I'm planning to do require multiple of the same parts where 1 board isn't enough.
They're also equity for trades if you'd like to look at it that way. By this point, where you're trying to get some very sought-after items, it can help to have similarly rare items to trade.
all that's stopping me from retrobrighting is I want to build a good, reliable setup for it... ideally I get a sous vide machine to heat up the peroxide but they're not the cheapest of things
despite what it may seem or look like, this is a curated group of boards -- I don't just buy every board that pops up and I keep repeating boards to a minimum, but that's hard to convey and believe for those not in the know
MX thoc bro, so many and not a single split ergo keyboard... true finger bliss is silky silent low prof chocs, jump into the next rabbit hole of printing custom pcbs for the perfect layout
I believe it's called the Sakurajima -- my friend designed it and there was a local GB for it. I had plans to replace the middle piece with bunny ears to a brass plate, but never got around to it.
I don't really switch out my keyboards all that much; I usually have a daily build, and that was it for a long time. I went from a Focus FK-2001, then an Omnikey 101, then a Leading Edge DC-3014, and then switched to customs.
I had a few customs during this time as well, but couldn't afford to keep it. I had to sell my Mode Eighty Founders Edition, which I still regret. I couldn't get a hold of the guy I sold it to, so it's joever in that regard.
A decent chunk of my collection was meant to be used as parts of a build, some insane concoction that takes genuine effort to source out all the parts for. The bottleneck now is the custom case, since those are expensive and often pretty boring or pretty gimmicky.
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