clickety-clack
This is my all-time favorite keyboard.
It's an IBM Model M/1391401 buckling spring keyboard. It came with a used IBM PS-2 386 computer I bought for $200 in 1994 when my employer finally joined the Windows world. It was manufactured in 1989, and it's made of steel -- seriously. The keys are heavy plastic, but the case itself is steel and it weighs quite a bit, much more than the cheap plastic keyboards computers come with today.
I remember noticing when I bought my first Dell PC later in 1994 that the keyboard was a) much quieter (buckling spring keyboards are notoriously "clacky"), b) much lighter and "cheap" feeling and c) much more inaccurate. I made many more typos on the Dell board, even though I found I also typed more slowly than on the IBM keyboard. I soon went back to the IBM keyboard.
Since then, each computer I've bought has come with a flimsier keyboard than the last. The latest Dell I bought came with a keyboard so laughable that at first I thought the box was empty. I now have a stack of three brand-new, still-boxed Dell keyboards in my office. Together they weigh less than my trusty Model M.
Typing on one of these "buckling spring" keyboards is very similar to typing on the old IBM Selectric typewriters (on which they were based). The keys are well-spaced and give a definite "click" when they're hit. There is none of the uncertainty one gets with a cheapo keyboard, and far fewer of the accidental keystrokes you make when your fingers can't really tell where one key stops and its neighbor starts. These keyboards actually make typing fun (and I am a hunt-and-peck typist).
The one problem with these keyboards is that they lack the "Windows" keys useful for minimizing all apps at once, but I found a small free program called Key Tweak that lets you re-map the keys in Windows 2000 or XP, and I remapped my right "Alt" key (which no one in recorded history has ever used) to be a "Windows" key. Problem solved.
Still, 1989 was a long time ago, so a while back I started looking for a new version of my old keyboard. I even bought two current IBM keyboards by mail, but while they were definitely superior to the cheesy Dell boards, they weren't even close to my old pal. Nobody, it seemed, was making keyboards the way they used to.
A few months ago, however, I discovered that someone is. A company called Unicomp had inherited the IBM keyboard operation, and was producing the original keyboards as well as a few interesting variations. So I now have a brand-new keyboard:
It's every bit as great as my old IBM keyboard and lacks only the few annoying squeaks the old one had developed since 1989.
Buckling spring keyboards seem to inspire an evangelical loyalty in their users. This Wikipedia entry gives a good overview of the Model M keyboard mystique, and more info can be found here:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3078215/
http://www.dansdata.com/ibmkeyboard.htm