Thread: Zx81
View Single Post
Old 14th Mar 2020, 9:11 pm   #58
Slothie
Octode
 
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK.
Posts: 1,287
Default Re: Zx81

Quote:
Originally Posted by Refugee View Post
Back in the 1980s a mate of mine took the PCB out of a ZX81 and housed it in a keyboard from an old computer system that was being removed from a commercial premises.
He did the pass thru mod and hid the power supply in the keyboard as well.
He had to peel the keypad to look at the tracks in order to copy them onto the back of the key-switches in his new keyboard.
It worked fine.
Oddly enough I did the same thing at the same time for my chicklet keyboard commodore PET 2001. i got a DEC VT52 keyboard from a computer scrap place in Maldon, Essex, cut all the tracks on the PCB and rewired it with single core wire from phone cable my dad liberated from a skip during a refit of the office he worked in. I made a 2-way adapter from veroboard and header connectors so you could use both keyboards as the mood took me (original keyboard for graphics, nrw one for actual text). Then we made a case for the keybosrd from plywood painted to match the PET connecting to the adapter by a rainbow ribbon cable. Labelling the keys that needed it was done by writing on bits of paper and sellotaping onto the keys which was crude but worked! Twenty years of being in the loft has meant most of them have dropped off, but they lasted for the 8 or so years it was my main computer and was a joy to use.
Slothie is offline