My friend Mark Evanier has an enjoyable ode today to Northgate keyboards–Northgate being the once-prominent-but-long-defunct PC clone manufacturer that made such great keyboards that folks are still buying, refurbishing, and using them. In an industry built on planned obsolescence–what are netbooks but disposable computers?–it’s pretty cool that there’s at least one product that was so well built that it’s outlived the company that built it by more than a decade and a half–so far.
(Me, I mostly work on notebooks these days and therefore have little say over the keyboard I use–though I like the keyboards on both the MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad that I bought last year, and they were factors in both purchases. The oldest piece of PC gear by far that I still use is a pair of Bose speakers; I got ’em in 1994, and haven’t bought another set since.)