I suspect people who want a bouncy feel would be better served by spring-mount, but they're rarer at the moment... or by plateless, which are even rarer. The trouble is that gasket mount can supply a measure of spring and is easier to design than spring-mount or plateless, so manufacturers tend to use that and people start expecting gasket-mounts to be bouncy.

So what are you to do? Cater both for people who want bounce and for people who want sound insulation without bounce. Maybe that's a spring-mount board for the bounce fans, maybe that's several specifications of gasket if you don't want to go spring-mount. After all, you (probably) offer several different choices of switch to suit people's differing tastes - why wouldn't you offer different gaskets to suit the differing tastes in the market?

I considered one of these when they were new... and that was my impression of the switches, too. It's quite an interesting switch, in a masochistic kind of way. Really they're the big weak point of the keyboard - the layout looks quite usable, and they're well enough constructed. Possibly someone else came to that conclusion too, as the later ones had Cherry MLs.

Theoretically it might be possible to find the model number of the controller and maybe flash QMK or ZMK on - or even desolder the controller and replace it with one that runs QMK. It's probably more trouble than it's worth though...

Oh, nice to see an APC-branded board. I've always liked that rack-mount layout. It's probably an 11903, Cherry used that specific number for APC boards - and probably Black switches, not necessarily capital-V Vintage but still smooth.

If you want to find out a little more about it, have a look underneath at the label. Cherry's date codes and article numbers are easy to read.

I hope low-profile will stay around and hopefully get better - but the situation at the moment isn't inspiring. Virtually no interchangeability is the big problem here, so instead of the competitive development we see in MX we have several manufacturers all trying to protect their own IP.

Couple that with the inherent difficulty in getting short-travel switches to feel good, the years of development time low-profile is behind standard-profile, and the involvement of the big keyboard manufacturers with their interest in an unchanging pinout and cap mount, and the picture isn't bright. If some manufacturers would get together and co-develop a switch, pooling the royalties, things might improve. But it doesn't seem likely at the moment.

The big prize for us enthusiasts would be a switch fully compatible (in footprint anyway) with standard MX. Then we might get more widespread take-up of low-profile, when it's easy to just swap in LP switches to try. There's probably a technical reason why someone hasn't done it already... but these problems are there to be solved ;)

This will all be sorted out in 20 years or so when the patents run out. But the question is whether any low-profile switch (apart from ML) will survive that long... we could end up in a Romer-G situation, where the bad name gained by the early attempts hinders take-up of the later versions.

I have some old Cherry Whites - factory-lubed Greens, ie heavy lubed Blues. I like them - the lube seems to take out some of the treble in the sound and makes the click feel softer, particularly at the beginning as the collar starts to engage. The only trouble is, with use mine have deteriorated in feel - but then, they've never been re-lubed. Modern lubricants might well last better.

I don't know if there are any other factory-lubed clickies - much of the attention in boutique switches seems to have gone towards replicating the Alps click feel (which isn't my preference). I also wonder if we could get closer to the Model M feel - perhaps using a conical or multi-stage spring.

I thought it was a Tandberg Data at first - Cherry made some for Tandberg with caps like that, numbered G84-9021 in their model number system, but I think that's the one in u/kanyesutra's comment. Looks like the caps could have been a standard design, perhaps, rather like the DIN standard in (West) Germany.

If it's really made in 1980, it could have some quite rare old switches. I think there are some RAFI or Siemens keyboards with that cap style. But chances of finding a non-intrusive converter are small - if you want to use it you might have to map the matrix and fit a new controller. You might try HaaTa's Kiibohd converters first, just in case he did one for your board.

Great - now you can identify which of the Alps variants you've got. Some Canons had the "complicated" Alps SKCL/M that are still loved now - others had curiosities like the double-action switch or the integrated dome switch that has a little rubber dome inside the switch body. If the sliders are coloured rather than black or white, they're probably one of the better switches.

Oh yes, the other thing I could have mentioned is code pages - the predecessors to Unicode, specific to a language or an area. Japanese had two or three, and eventually they worked out a way of switching between them automatically... but the way they found breaks Unicode, so old web pages written for Shift-JIS can go strange if the browser thinks they're in Unicode!

Google isn't the only search engine, you know ;) Try Qwant.com or start.duckduckgo.com, or pick a Searx implementation to combine multiple engines.

Yes. Though given this one was for typesetting, probably not so many foreigners ended up using one - the normal-use computers of the time wouldn't have been able to handle kanji anyway, they had enough bother dealing with hiragana and katakana! (I also don't know how computers handled the rarer kana systems before IMEs - perhaps they just didn't.) Some Western typesetting systems had big keyboards too, often using mechanical switches or even some of the exotica like magnetic switches.

Here's a site with lots of old Japanese keyboards. NEC had column stagger long before the Ergodox!

To add a historical note: before IMEs, the Japanese keyboards used hiragana or katakana, mostly one kana per key (some were shifted, eg ぁ was Shift-あ). Mostly they had a QWERTY-like layout with some extra keys, but there were several different layouts designed to be more ergonomic - the modern Esrille Nisse can emulate some of the ergonomic layouts. It's still possible to use the kana layouts with an IME, and Japanese keyboards still have the extra keys for switching between writing systems.

For kanji, at least to start with, it was really unavoidable to have a big array. The keyboards used a 9- or 12-layer system, but they were still huge, some running to over 500 keys. Here's an Alps one, with Planck for scale - there's more info and photos on Deskthority. IIRC Chinese typewriters assembled characters in the way Captain_Crispyy described.

Every Canon typewriter I see, I wonder if it's got an interesting Alps switch. Going by Deskthority's wiki this might well have some sort of Alps - could be worth taking a look.

Do you have old Kailh BOX switches, by any chance? The first batch had the stem too big.

It isn't quite a Business Ten Keypad - perhaps it's a Business Full Numpad. If people want to ascribe a different meaning to BFN, they're welcome to do so ;)

A few years ago someone made a macrobar by folding the membrane of a Cherry G86 keyboard in half. They had to do it carefully so the traces didn't break, but they ended up with a working keyboard. You might be able to do something similar, perhaps. https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?p=233187&sid=76253b9b87174d7a5bfc67ebe650a1d7#p233187