Tag: keyboard

Actual physical objects made of stuff · Computers · Flat Things

Can you swap the keyboards between a Thinkpad T40 and an IBM SK-8845?

Chris Cannam2 Comments

No.

(I’m posting this because it’s something I searched for and didn’t find an answer to.)

The SK-8845 and its sibling the SK-8840 are IBM-branded keyboards with built-in trackpoint and trackpad.

They appear to be essentially the keyboards from Thinkpad T40 (or T41, T42, T43) laptops, pulled out and put in a separate case for use as a compact keyboard/mouse controller in a server room. They’re pretty good keyboards in a classic Thinkpad laptop sort of way.

I have an SK-8840, which is the (less common?) PS/2 variant. As far as I can tell from photos, without having seen one in person, the SK-8845 is the same keyboard with a USB plug on it.

Here’s the SK-8840:

IBM SK-8840 keyboard. I’m sorry, I removed the trackpoint. I always do – I never use it and it gets in the way a little. I do keep the trackpoints in case I want to sell up though. Have you noticed the trackpoint pin is rotated 45° from the normal Thinkpad keyboards? I wonder why.

Visually this is much the same as the keyboard on the T4x series of Thinkpad laptops, which are truly excellent. It doesn’t feel like a T40 keyboard though. It’s more like the later, still good but not quite so good T60 series. So I wondered whether it was possible to swap the keyboard part with that from (ahem) one of my T4x laptops.

The answer is no: it’s physically incompatible. The plate at the back is different, the connections are different, the stand-offs are different. It may be possible to adapt one into the other and that could be an interesting project for someone more ambitious than me, but it definitely isn’t a case of just pulling out the keyboard part and plugging it in. The same goes for the T60.

Here’s the innards, and the back of the keyboard plate, of the SK-8840:

Here are the backs of the keyboards from a T40 (above) and T60 (below):

That’s all.

Computers

Hard edges, small keys

Chris Cannam

Joanna Stern reviews the MacBook Air as a Windows laptop.

I enjoyed this—I’ve considered in the past whether the MacBook Air would be a suitable laptop for me even though most of the time I don’t run OS/X. (Conclusion: probably not any more, though it might have seemed that way once.)

She does highlight the thing I’ve always found most painful about the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro: that vicious sharp edge along the front. (sucks teeth in recollection of past pain)

But she likes the trackpad. I’m not keen on the Mac trackpad, finding it too easy to operate by accident and too hard to “click” reliably. Perhaps it’s just that the PC vendors’ attempts at the Crazy New-Era Big Trackpad are worse.

The review is of a machine with a US keyboard, so although there are some quibbles about keyboard layout, there’s nothing to compare to the difficulties presented to the UK programmer—most obviously the lack of a hash sign (#) anywhere on the keyboard, and the tiny, tiny Return key (right).

The Return key is hard to hit on every current Mac and MacBook UK keyboard, even where there’s plenty of room to spare in the chassis.

It just feels gratuitously punitive to me. And that’s surely the way it is, given that Apple did it perfectly well in their older keyboards. They do know how to make a big Return key. They have learned the technology. They just think it’s not quite appropriate to accommodate whims like that from us.