The keyboard that gave us the standardised layout on both sides of the Atlantic, with its quintessential 100% form factor and classic buckling spring mechanical keys (in most instances), is about to have its midlife crisis. In typical fashion, it's off to buy an expensive convertible.
There's no doubt that the Model M is a true icon that's adorned the desk of many PC users over the years, including plenty of film appearances. It makes sense, therefore, to take a look at where we've come from and how the classic legacy of this keyboard lives on decades later.
The Model M started out as a replacement for IBM's Model F keyboard that was previously bundled with its terminals. That became too expensive to produce, so IBM looked to replace it with a "low cost, high volume" alternative: the Model M.
The first Model M (or then, the IBM Enhanced Keyboard) was the keyboard IBM threw in with its 3161 model terminal and, outside of the typewriter and industrial models, is the genesis for the keyboard in the mainstream with the features that have become ubiquitous elsewhere, most notably key placement for things like the Control and 'inverted T' arrow keys.
A lot of these decisions reportedly had IBM's Human Factors Research Groups involved to find the most efficient way for typists to use a keyboard by allowing them to move keys around, enlarge, or duplicate them, and what resulted is essentially the full-size keyboard layout we have today. Both the ISO and ANSI standard layouts were finalised ten to fifteen years after the Model M's inception and only made minor changes, such as adding the Windows and Menu keys.
To understand a little more about the genesis of the Model M, I took some time a couple of weeks ago and sat down with Don Bowman, the vice president of development at Unicomp, and someone who has been involved with IBM, Lexmark, and Unicomp for the last four decades. Bowman's time goes way back, covering the keyboard side of the business at Unicomp and the typewriters and printers at IBM and Lexmark respectively.
According to Bowman, IBM decided to integrate the individual buckling spring switch assemblies used into one frame, which significantly reduced the part count and associated costs, while preserving the advantage of its infamous buckling spring switch. As per the extensive resource on the Model M from Sharktastica, IBM changed the way the switches were sensed—changing to a membrane assembly rather than a capacitive pad card (as with the Model F) cut costs in half according to the 1983 patent for membrane buckling springs, so was likely a huge money saver for IBM.
Combine this with the introduction of IBM's Personal System 2 of computers (or PS/2,where the connector gets its name from), which shipped with proper Model Ms and sold in droves, and you quickly got a keyboard that had a lot of uptake and became a favourite.
People love the Model M for various reasons. For some, it's a reminder of childhood or years gone by, or simply of a time when the keyboard packed in with your PC wasn't something that you hurled into your nearest recycler, as today. For others, including by Bowman's reckoning, it's down to the buckling spring switches inside and their associated qualities.
Buckling springs have a different feel against the litany of modern keyboard switches you'll find, and I count Cherry MX in that (whose inception was two years before the Model M). What gives them their distinctly loud and tactile character is the fact that it is a literal spring buckling under pressure from the keycap that pushes down on contact pads on a plastic membrane beneath, completing the circuit and allowing a keypress to be registered.
They're a much heavier, and indeed louder, keypress than a lot of the switches you'll find out there today, complete with a lot more case ping. If you aren't used to it, typing on them can get quite fatiguing quite quickly. Of course, being so loud means they aren't really designed for use in communal areas, although I've found their distinctive click to offer a pleasant rhythmic quality that keeps me focused on the task at hand. Nonetheless, there are plenty of folks (sometimes including myself) who swear by buckling springs as a fun switch to use, just as long as you work your fingers up to it.
Bowman also contended that folks love the Model M because it's the direct engineering descendant of IBM's typewriters of the 1930s that runs through to their keypunch machines and early terminals, before going into the more modern word processing workstations and personal computers. In essence, the Model M is the ultimate realisation of those applications.
Throughout its life, the Model M went through various changes, especially when IBM sold off a portion of keyboard business to Lexmark in 1991. This resulted in some Model Ms with a thinner backplate, and cheaper plastic shells, for cost-cutting—some models also ditched the buckling springs for rubber domes as part of a wider shift at the time towards lower-cost bundle-in keyboards.
When a five-year agreement that obligated IBM to purchase most of its keyboard from Lexmark expired in March 1996, Lexmark exited the keyboard business and sold its assets back to IBM and to Maxi-Switch, ceasing their Model M production—they chose instead to focus on the printer business. IBM continued to make buckling-spring models at their Scottish plant until 1999.
According to Bowman, Lexmark instructed then product manager of their keyboard business unit, Neil Muyskens, to find a buyer for the keyboard business. In spite of the high unit volume, as IBM was still buying keyboards from Lexmark at the time, he couldn't find a buyer. In the end, Muyskens went to Lexmark and offered to buy the business himself in a deal that included the tooling, designs and patent portfolio—he formed Unicomp as a means of managing the business.
Unicomp still manufactures Model Ms to this day in varying forms, be it a modern take on the variant, Mac variants, one with a trackball, or even in the old 122-key terminal variant. There is also a recently introduced Mini M model that harks back to the rare SSK (Space Saving Keyboard) variant of the original M. Bowman told me this took nearly 20 years to see the light of day, and was one of the last products that Muyskens saw before his unfortunate passing in March 2021.
In my very first piece for this website, some four years ago, I looked at the then-new Model M, which I contended was a truly lovely product, and I stand by that. With its buckling springs, sturdy plastic frame, and gorgeous two-tone dye-sublimated keycaps, it remains a standout. It's still in my rotation of mechanical keyboards to this day, alongside a reproduction of the even older Model F.
Bowman told me that the real challenge with making keyboards like the Model M these days is cost, as everything is still assembled in the USA. He said there are a lot of piece parts that still need to be manually put in, which along with the staff employed to put the keyboard together, makes them comparably expensive.
With this in mind, while they are premium products with a niche audience in the main, there are fair amount of corporate customers who still utilise the Model M due to its preceding reputation for quality, reliability and durability. Bowman said it was still likely to find them on factory floors, in medical workstations and in retail and service locations; he also told me that because they can customise keyboards in-house for folks with specific requirements, there is still business with customers such as some military organisations for things such as having logos or names on the space bar.
Intriguingly, Bowman stated that one of Neil Musykens and his great aims was to take Unicomp into the gaming business somehow, although he stated that it'd potentially be with a different product rather than a Model M-style option. After all, the heavy keypress, lack of NKRO and such isn't too favourable for high-intensity gaming.
Then again, I don't personally feel that Unicomp needs to make any changes to what is clearly a winning formula. There is clearly demand for the Model M-style buckling spring keyboards in their varying forms given the tactile feel and acoustic feedback that's very rare to find in any other keyboard.
I'd probably go as far to say that the Model M is one of the most important, yet underrated, innovations of the twentieth century. Without its inception, we wouldn't have the standard keyboard layout to pair with PCs today and if we didn't have that, then the chances are that things would have been very different. So, let's raise a glass to the IBM Model M in all its forms and subsequent means—happy 40th birthday—it seems like it's here to stay for the foreseeable, which is only a good thing.
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